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COPYRIGHT DEPOSiT. 



The Soul of Ulster 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



The First Seven 
Divisions 

A detailed and authori- 
tative account of the part 
taken by the British army 
in the fighting from Mons 
to Ypres. It is the splen- 
did epitaph of England's 
professional army, which 
at the end of the three 
months was practically 
annihilated. 

With Maps. :: $1.50 Net. 



The Soul of Ulster 

By Ernest W. Hamilton, c4uthor 

of **The First Seven Divisions/' :: :: :: 




NEW YORK 

E. P. VUTTON & CO. 

68 1 FIFTH c/lVENUE 






COPYRIGHT, 1917, 

By E. p. DUTTON & CO. 



printed (n the anitcd States of Hmerfca 



m I 19/7 

'CI.A462833 



PREFACE 

It has been very truly said that the Ulster question 
is only properly understood by Ulstermen, residents 
in other parts of Ireland having, at the best, an 
incomplete grasp of the real deep-down issues. It 
may, I think, with equal truth be added that mere 
residence in Ulster is not in itself sufficient to lay 
bare the inner soul of the people, there being — in 
the case of the native part of the population — a very 
wide gap between their secret feelings and that which 
appears on the surface. In moments of acute political 
interest this gap becomes sensibly lessened. 

North Tyrone has been the scene — since the Re- 
distribution Bill — of more closely-contested elections 
than any other Constituency in the kingdom; and as 
one who has taken an active part — as principal or 
otherwise — in all of these contests, I have perhaps 
had exceptional opportunities of getting occasional 
rather startling glimpses of the real soul of Ulster. 

Ernest Hamilton, 

M.P. for North Tyrone, 
1885-1892. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Ulster prior to Colonization ... 1 

The Ulster Plantation 19 

The Cromwellian Settlement . . , 55 

The Civil War 73 

The 1798 Rebellion 89 

Ulster To-day 107 

Moonlight Outrages 141 

The Red Hand of Ulster .... 153 

Conclusion 177 



ULSTER PRIOR TO COLONIZATION 



THE ethics of the Ulster question 
are fast bound up in the general 
ethics of colonization. Is colonization to 
be classed as an act of piracy, or is it a 
necessary part of the gradual reclamation 
of the world? It may be both, in which 
case the problem is still further resolved 
into the question as to whether the good 
resulting from colonization justifies the 
original act? Most people will agree that 
the answer must depend upon the parti- 
cular circumstances surrounding each case. 
A broad, general principle which will 
govern all cases seems out of reach. 



3 



4 The Soul of Ulster 

Religion is perhaps the most attractive 
excuse, because all proselytizers, if sincere 
in the belief that their particular gospel 
alone carries the secret of salvation, must 
equally believe that the end justifies the 
means. It is a logical sequence. And so 
it comes about that most of history's 
blackest or reddest acts bear the official 
stamp of God's service. 

In Australia, New Zealand and North 
America the Gospel has succeeded more 
primitive creeds, and we therefore comfort 
ourselves with the reflection that all is 
well, including the unpublished and, in 
many cases, unpublishable, processes by 
which this came about. Into these pro- 
cesses few care to inquire, but we find 
that the net result in every case is a 
steady disappearance of the native 
element. This one concrete fact is in 



Ulster Prior to Colonization 5 

itself perhaps more eloquent than any 
history. It seems to point with some 
plainness to the conclusion that the land 
and not the souls of the natives was the 
first aim of the colonists, or, in any case, 
that, if the salvation of their souls was 
secured, it was done by the convenient 
sacrifice of their bodies. 

In a world whose most unpopular 
product is the naked truth, we need never 
expect the picture of British colonization 
the world over to be faithfully drawn. 
It would, perhaps, not be a pretty picture. 
But, ugly as it might be in its truth, it 
would still fail to suggest — even to the 
most philanthropic — any obvious and at 
the same time practicable act of repara- 
tion. The philanthropist might deplore 
the wicked acts of other days, but he could 
not undo them; he could not even 



6 The Soul of Ulster 

neutralize them; and however sincere his 
philanthropy, he would hardly — even if 
he could — reconstitute the anti-coloniza- 
tion conditions. 

It can safely be said that no coloni- 
zation scheme has ever been more abun- 
dantly justified, both by antecedent 
conditions and by results, than has that 
of Ulster by James I. of England. The 
antecedent conditions were, in fact, very 
bad, and even apologetic ingenuity could 
hardly argue that the fault lay at the door 
of the English. If ever a province of 
Ireland enjoyed Home Rule, that province 
was Ulster prior to the Great Plantation 
of 1609. The population was almost ex- 
clusively native. The stream of English 
undertakers and adventurers which for 
centuries had been attracted by the rich 
pastures of Munster and Leinster, found 



Ulster Prior to Colonization 7 

no similar attraction in the barren bogs 
of the cold northern Province. Ulster 
had been left severely alone. It had a 
poor soil, a cold climate, a savage popula- 
tion, and it was dangerously remote from 
the Pale, and all the official protection 
afforded by the armed forces of that 
British oasis. 

In Antrim there was, during the latter 
half of the sixteenth century, a certain 
sprinkling of Scotch Campbells and 
McDonnels, but these formed a migratory 
population, coming and going as oppor- 
tunity for fighting arose. Down and 
Armagh could also boast a handful of 
English settlers, eking out a struggling 
and miserable existence by their own 
labour on boycotted lands subject at all 
times to forays and rapine. 

Outside of the three eastern counties 



8 The Soul of Ulster 

there were no agricultural settlers, and 
the native Irish could rule and be ruled 
as they wished. Taking it from shore to 
shore, Ulster was incomparably the most 
Irish of the four Provinces, and it was 
reigned over by the O'Neills, of whom 
the most interesting historically was 
Shane. Shane in his day styled him- 
self King of Ulster, and in truth he 
had some claim to this title. O'Reilly, 
O'Hanlon and O'Kane admitted his 
sovereignty; O'Donnell and Maguire at 
times disputed it and suffered accordingly. 
Shane was nothing but a coarse and 
common savage. He would seem to have 
had no virtues and all the vices. To 
secure his succession, he murdered his 
nearest relative. O'Donnell accused him 
in 1564 of having caused the death of 
500 persons of quality, and of at least 



Ulster Prior to Colonization 9 

14,000 of the poor. On one occasion, in 
1562, he had a difference of opinion with 
Maguire, to settle which he fell upon that 
chieftain's harvest people at Belleek and 
killed 300 men, women and children. He 
was inordinately and grotesquely vain, 
especially of his least commendable 
exploits. 

As may well be supposed, the vices of 
Shane were not confined to the walls of 
his own castle at Dungannon. They 
appear to have been common to the 
whole province. Fitzwilliam, writing to 
Cecil towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, 
complained that he was "a banished 
man wearing himself out among unkind 
people — a people most accursed, who 
lusted after every sin. Murder and incest 
were every-day matters, and a lying 
spirit brooded over all the land." Sidney, 



10 The Soul of Ulster 

writing to the Queen herself, in 1567, 
says: "Surely there was never people 
of worse minds, for matrimony is no 
more regarded in effect than conjunction 
between unreasoning beasts. Perjury, 
murder and robbery counted allowable. 
Finally, I cannot find that they make any 
conscience of sin." 

Not only was Ulster the worst of the 
Provinces socially and morally, but it 
was by far the most backward in industrial 
enterprise. There was but little tillage 
and no settled industries. Herds of cattle 
formed the chief means of subsistence, 
and these changed hands with uncomfort- 
able frequency and to the usual accom- 
paniment of murder and outrage. Might 
was the only right. The rich system- 
atically oppressed the poor, and the lot of 
the lower orders was miserable indeed. 



Ulster Prior to Colonization 11 

There was no law but the old Brehon law 
which invariably found a verdict for the 
richer and the stronger. Virtues were 
not accounted as such. The standard of 
morality was set by wandering bards 
known as Rhymers, whose panegyrics 
extolled not nobility of thought and 
action, "but the most beastliest and 
odious parts of men's doings, and their 
own likewise for whom the rhymes be 
made. Such be cherished, defended, and 
rewarded with garments till they leave 
themselves naked." * 

The above occasional glimpses of a 
Pan-Celtic Ulster under its own chieftains 
are not furnished as a suggestion of what 
might recur under Home Rule, but 
simply as a justification of the initial act 
of colonization. Where such was the 

* Fitzwilliam to Elizabeth, 



12 The Soul of Ulster 

state of society, it was clear that a remedy 
of some sort was called for, not in the 
interests of England but in the interests 
of Ulster itself. Coercion and instruction 
were alike failures as instruments of 
reform; only the example of a more 
advanced civilization working in their 
midst could be expected to open the eyes 
of the natives to the higher possibilities 
of existence. 

At the end of the sixteenth century, 
English and Irish had been in more or 
less close touch for over four hundred 
years; but though, during that period, 
England had advanced to a comparatively 
high state of civilization, Ireland had 
remained stationary. The contemporaries 
in Ireland of Shakespeare were the 
Rhymers extolling in verse, which merci- 
fully has not survived, "The beastliest 



Ulster Prior to Colonization 13 

and most odious parts of men's doings." 
Century after century had passed without 
Ireland registering even a fractional 
advance in manners or culture. It sys- 
tematically resented all attempts to raise 
it out of the mire. In that mire it had 
lived from the back of history, and in 
that mire it was content and, indeed, 
determined to remain. Settled laws, 
settled industries were beyond its under- 
standing, and like all aboriginal countries, 
it resented what it could not understand. 

The bane of the country had always 
been its geographical position. It lay on 
the very western limit of the world — an 
inaccessible island to which the enlighten- 
ment born of the interchange of ideas 
between nations could never penetrate 
except by hearsay. It was outside the 
radius of first-hand social and moral 



14 The Soul of Ulster 

evolution, and the imported article it 
invariably regarded with suspicion. 

The gradual elevation of thought which 
has reclaimed Europe from the savagery 
of the dark ages can be traced by the 
student of history to periodical crusades 
started here and there against existing 
practices. The original crusade may be, 
and generally is, the work of one man, 
but the work which he has started is 
carried on after his death by sects or 
societies of which he remains the inspira- 
tion. The new ideas gradually take hold, 
and so the world advances, each country 
in turn assimilating the reforms of its 
neighbour. 

An isolated country is naturally 
debarred from participation in such 
advance, but it remains happily (or 
unhappily) unconscious of its stagnation. 



Ulster Prior to Colonization 15 

through lack of opportunity for comparing 
itself with others. Not only this, but in 
the absence of a wholesome standard of 
comparison, it readily falls into the error 
of over-estimating its own merits and 
importance in the world. It becomes the 
victim of megalomania. This would be 
a harmless vanity enough, did it not 
inevitably carry with it the absence of 
effort or even of desire to improve. When 
a country is not only ignorant but also 
incredulous of its own relative inferiority, 
that country is doomed by the gods to 
destruction. England herself has suffered 
much from this common hallucination of 
the insular; Ireland far more so. There 
has been no real eradication of primitive 
impulses. Behind a ready but thin 
assumption of agreement with imported 
ideas, the basic nature of the native Irish 



16 The Soul of Ulster 

Celt remains to-day the same as it was 
in the days of Elizabeth; the same as it 
was in the days of Strongbow, and pro- 
bably very much the same as it was in 
the days of Noah. The progressive views 
of the idealist will be glibly applauded, 
but they make no more lasting impression 
than a rainbow. It is mainly owing to 
this barrier between them and all recog- 
nized forms of thought that the Irish are 
so proverbially apt to mistake their best 
friends for their foes, and their worst 
foes for their friends. 

The peculiarities of the native Irish 
character were — even in the days of 
Elizabeth — thoroughly understood by 
those on the spot, but not so by the 
politicians at home — an anomaly by no 
means confined to the sixteenth century; 
and as the politicians always held the 



Ulster Prior to Colonization 17 

purse-strings, and always knew better 
than the administrator, it is not surprising 
that the heart, health and fortune of the 
latter unhappy functionary usually ended 
by being broken. 

After Shane's death, Essex was 
appointed Governor of Ulster. His ad- 
ministration was not a success. He was 
supplied with a mere handful of soldiers, 
underpaid and underfed, and the chieftains 
could afford to laugh at him. His term 
of office was marred by one or two acts of 
flagrant treachery which even the excuse 
of retaliation could not justify. 

Essex's armed incursions were directed 
no less against the Antrim Scotch than 
against the Irish. These Scotch were not 
colonists in the ordinary sense; they 
were mercenary soldiers whom the Irish 
chiefs employed to fight their inter-tribal 



18 The Soul of Ulster 

battles for them. Their fighting reputa- 
tion was great, and they would do battle 
for anyone who paid them. Sir Francis 
Knollys reckoned in 1566 that 100 of 
the Scots were more formidable as foes 
than 200 of the Irish. In any case, they 
were more than a match for Essex, and 
he made no headway against them. He 
finally died in Dublin in 1576, a broken 
and disappointed man. 



THE ULSTER PLANTATION 



fTHHE end of the sixteenth century 
^ saw O'Neill and O'Donnell joining 
hands in a fresh endeavour to extend 
their own rule even beyond the bounds 
of Ulster. In September, 1601, 6,000 
Spanish troops landed at Kinsale, and 
with these the two northern Chiefs, after 
a devastating march through Ireland, 
managed to join forces. Mount joy, how- 
ever, who had succeeded the second Essex 
as Deputy, collected an army and very 
easily defeated the combined forces, who 
were seized with an unaccountable panic. 
The Spaniards — who, according to the 
historian, were not such fast runners as 
the Irish — had to bear the brunt of the 
pursuit and many fell. The total casualties 

21 



22 The Soul of Ulster 

on the English side were one man killed. 
O'Neill himself, seeing the game was up, 
shortly afterwards presented himself before 
Mount joy, and on his knees swore eternal 
loyalty. 

This rebellion may be written down as 
the direct cause of the Ulster Plantation. 
O'Neill and O'Donnell left the country 
and their lands were confiscated. The 
Four Masters record the circumstance as 
follows: "It was from this rising and 
from the departure of the Earls that 
their principalities, their territories, their 
estates, their lands, their forts, their 
fruitful harbours, and their fishful bays 
were taken from the Irish of the province 
of Ulster, and were given in their presence 
to foreign tribes; and they were expelled 
and banished into other countries, where 
most of them died." 



The Ulster Plantation 23 

In these few words is recorded Ireland's 
great grievance. The "foreign tribes" 
were the Ulster Protestants, and they were 
introduced on to the scene as follows. 

James VI. of Scotland succeeded to the 
English throne upon the death of Eliza- 
beth in March, 1603. The immediate 
effect of his accession was that England^ 
and Scotland now for the first time be- 
came united under one sovereign. The 
Scots became "Britons," * fellow members 
with the English of the joint kingdom; 
and to the astute mind of James the idea 
presented itself of utilizing these new 
recruits to the national flag for purposes 
of still further consolidating the United 
Kingdom. 

James conceived the idea of the Planta- 
tion of O'Neill's and O'Donnell's forfeited 

* The actual title was not established till 1701. 



24 The Soul of Ulster 

lands with a colony of British. This 
much-abused monarch, who certainly 
managed to get the wrong side of con- 
temporary historians — possibly by out- 
manoeuvring them in debate — could at 
least boast an active, if not always a 
tactful, brain. He was a thinker and a 
man of ideas, some of which were good 
and some bad, a phenomenon not wholly 
confined to the first of the English Stuarts. 
The Ulster Plantation idea was, when all 
is said and done, a good one, and based 
on those purely logical deductions on 
which James so greatly prided himself. 
He saw a land, by no means evilly used by 
nature, which from time immemorial had 
been a by-word — a country torn by in- 
ternal strife, saturated with its own blood 
shed by itself, idle, ragged and wretched. 
It was fairly arguable that such a state 



The Ulster Plantation 25 

of things, being chronic and having suc- 
cessfully survived all remedies prescribed, 
might be due not to the malevolence of 
fate, or to the incompetence of the English 
Government, but to the inherent qualities 
of the natives themselves, to whom every 
form of restraint and every form of 
settled industry seemed intolerable. From 
this it was but a step to the natural 
corollary that the remedy lay in the 
introduction of a more solid and stable 
race. 

The idea so far could hardly claim the 
merit of originality. It had indeed been 
tried in Ireland with unvarying non- 
success for four hundred years. The Pale 
was the brightest example of the system's 
workings, and the condition of that 
uneasy settlement was not an entirely 
happy augury for the success of similar 



26 The Soul of Ulster 

ventures. The other planted areas in 
Munster and Leinster stood out as colossal 
monuments of failure, sufficient to damp 
the enterprise even of the most logical of 
monarchs. James' logic, however, had 
an eminently practical side. The mere 
fact of failure was not enough for him. 
Like Aristotle, he burrowed below the 
surface for causes — material or efficient. 
Both seemed to be found in one salient 
fact. Many of the earlier settlers had 
come to Ireland without their women- 
folk, had married with the natives, re- 
married in the second generation, and in 
the third had lost their identity and 
become merged in the hybrid mass of 
Anglo-Norman-Irish, and Anglo-Irish, 
which so successfully added to the con- 
fusion and unrest of central and southern 
Ireland. In the case of some of the 



The Ulster Plantation 27 

earlier settlers, this absorption was 
thorough and complete. Here there had 
been no religious barrier. The settlers — 
mostly men of ill-defined principles — 
quickly assimilated the native habits, 
adopted native views, and even native 
names, and became — in the words of the 
contemporary historian — more Irish than 
the Irish themselves. 

With the later settlers the process was 
less thorough. These came over as Pro- 
testants, recent converts to whom the 
old faith was anathema, and, through all 
the mixed-up jumble of subsequent cen- 
turies, they retained their distinctive 
religion and their distinctive Anglo-Nor- 
man names. In many cases, however, 
the distinctive English characteristics of 
this secondary tide of settlers had under- 
gone marked changes. They were few 



28 The Soul of Ulster 

and the natives were many, and, on the 
principle that it is easier to go down hill 
than up, they followed the line of least 
resistance and absorbed many of the 
manners and customs of those whom their 
ostensible mission was to elevate. 

James reviewed these former failures 
with an analytical eye. Why had they 
failed? What was the cause? The im- 
mediate cause was very obviously that, 
instead of the settlers pushing the mass of 
natives up the hill of good behaviour, the 
mass of natives had pushed them down. 
But it was clear that a remedy must be 
looked for in the discovery of more remote 
causes than these. To the mind of James, 
it seemed (1), that the earlier settlers had 
been too few in number; (2), that their 
lack of their own women-folk spelt certain 
disaster; (3), that they had been of the 



The Ulster Plantation 29 

wrong class. The first two of these pro- 
positions were fairly obvious. The dis- 
covery of the third gave evidence of more 
acumen. The Munster and Leinster 
settlers had been mere needy adventurers, 
broken men for the most part, or ne'er- 
do-wells of good family, who embarked on 
the Irish undertaking with the avowed 
intention of making all they could out of 
it by fair means or foul ; as a rule the means 
were foul. Agricultural and industrial 
stability could never grow out of such 
seed. So thought James. For the suc- 
cess of his Ulster scheme a more sub- 
stantial strain was called for, and, by the 
ordination of fate, one lay ready to his 
hand. 

Throughout the reigns of Henry VIII., 
Mary, and Elizabeth, the Border Counties 
of Dumfriesshire, Roxburghshire, Cumber- 



30 The Soul of Ulster 

land and Northumberland had been a 
cause of unceasing trouble to the two 
kingdoms, the jurisdiction of which both 
sides of the Border repudiated in favour 
of a more congenial code of their own. 
Internal and interminable feuds, between 
the representatives of England on the one 
side and Scotland on the other, had kept 
the Middle and Western Marches in a 
state of ceaseless broil for close on a cen- 
tury. The Wardens were either powerless 
to interfere or were themselves impli- 
cated. With the Union of the two king- 
doms under James, it was clearly desir- 
able that these border raids and forays 
should cease; but they did not cease. 
The county boundaries still remained, and 
to the Border mind these county boun- 
daries offered every justification for a 
continuance of the enjoyable traditional 



The Ulster Plantation 31 

feuds. The technical union of the two 
countries meant nothing to them. 

To James, newly installed on his English 
throne, came the great idea of quieting 
the unruly Border country and colonizing 
Ulster with one and the same stroke. 
It was true that at first sight the Borderers 
appeared to be little less lawless and un- 
ruly than the Ulster natives whom they 
were to replace, or rather to reform by 
their example; but a closer examination 
showed up very marked differences, and 
differences which pointed to James' plan 
being less of a wild-cat scheme, when 
analysed, than appeared on the sur- 
face. 

The Borderers were lawless and unruly 
from the national point of view, but from 
their own point of view they were neither 
the one nor the other. All their actions 



32 The Soul of Ulster 

were governed by a rigid code, the viola- 
tion of which carried with it disgrace worse 
than death, and the violation of which was, 
as a consequence, extremely rare. They 
could also boast some fine sterling quali- 
ties which, at that time, were certainly 
strange to the land of their prospective 
adoption. Their word, once given, was 
binding even to death. A broken word was 
a crime blacker than murder. To such an 
extent was this reverence for the sanctity 
of a promise carried that even a prisoner 
going to execution was not bound, when 
he had once passed his word. Treachery 
of any and every kind was looked 
upon with unspeakable abhorrence. They 
were brave, too, these Borderers, with a 
dogged, resolute bravery that was equally 
a part of their code, and they had a strong 
sense of justice which was superior to the 



The Ulster Plantation 33 

rancour even of the bitterest blood feuds. 
They were exclusively Protestant. 

Enough has been said to show that 
here, at any rate, was a race endowed 
with many of the essentials for successful 
colonization. It was argued, with some 
show of reason, that their international 
feuds — which were mainly a matter of 
tradition and of geography (the English 
and Scotch Borderers being of identical 
race) — would abruptly die out amidst new 
surroundings, and that their common 
interests would weld them into solid union. 

In 1609 the work of deportation started 
and continued for several years. Arm- 
strongs, Elliots, Johnstones, Pattersons, 
Watsons, Thompsons, Riddles, Littles, 
Scotts, Bells, Turnbulls, Pringles, Rout- 
ledges, Andersons, Blacks, Bairds, Nixons, 
Dicksons, Crosiers, Rutherfords, Beatties 



34 The Soul of Ulster 

and a host of other Border clans crossed 
the seas, with their wives and families, 
and turned their backs for good and all 
on the land of their birth. So was carried 
out the great Ulster Plantation. There 
was no armed opposition; the natives 
withdrew into the mountain districts, and 
the colonists settled down on the granted 
lands. They increased and multiplied; 
they utilized the water-power for factories; 
they reclaimed the bogs and tilled the land 
so gained. All went well in the planted 
districts. Peace and prosperity took the 
place of rapine and misery, and before the 
first quarter of the Seventeenth Century 
was passed the justification of the Ulster 
Plantation seemed beyond dispute. 



The Ulster Plantation 35 

1641 

Thirty-two years had passed since the 
first batch of British colonists had 
landed in Ulster. A second generation 
of the settlers had sprung up, strictly 
within the bounds of the Colony. The 
two races had kept jealously apart. At 
the same time there was no open friction. 
The natives, with characteristic adula- 
tion of success, either feigned or real, 
turned tolerant faces on the settlers, 
while these, for their part, had no cause 
to be other than friendly with those that 
they had come to live among. But there 
was no intermarriage. The settlers were 
in sufficient numbers to make this 
unnecessary, and racial prejudices still 
ran very high. 

Then, just as Ulster was beginning to 



36 The Soul of Ulster 

put on the garb of her ultimate prosperity, 
came the great massacre of 1641-1642. 
Without any provocation, and equally 
without any warning, the native Irish, 
who for thirty-two years had given no 
sign of hostility, rose at a preconceived 
signal, fell upon the isolated colonists, 
and stripped them literally to the skin. 
In this condition men, women and chil- 
dren were turned out into the cold. All 
succour and sustenance to the outcasts 
was prohibited under very dire penalties, 
so that the old and the ailing quickly 
succumbed. The more vigorous, how- 
ever, hung on to life by one means or 
another, and at the end of a week, nature's 
processes were voted too slow, and the 
hunting down and butchery of these 
naked wretches became a recognized form 
of sport. In its turn mere killing began 



The Ulster Plantation 37 

to pall, and tortures of various kinds 
were resorted to, at first as a means of 
finding out where the settlers had hidden 
their money, but later on for the mere 
sake of torturing. A letter was read in 
the English Parliament in December, 1641, 
which stated: 

"All I can tell you is the miserable 
state we continue under, for the rebels 
daily increase in men and munition in all 
parts, except the province of Munster, 
exercising all manner of cruelties, and 
striving who can be most barbarously 
exquisite in tormenting the poor Pro- 
testants, cutting off their ears, fingers and 
hands, plucking out their eyes, boiling 
the hands of little children before their 
mothers' faces, stripping women naked and 
ripping them up," etc. 



38 The Soul of Ulster 

The main record, however, of this 
terrible occurrence is furnished by Sir 
John Temple, Master of the Rolls at the 
time, who collected and published in book 
form the sworn depositions of the many 
witnesses who gave evidence before the 
Commission of Enquiry. Many of the 
witnesses had themselves been mutilated, 
but survived long enough to give their 
evidence. Others had a knowledge of 
the Irish language, by means of which 
they were able to pass themselves off as 
Irish, and so remain unwilling witnesses 
of the scenes which they describe. Forty 
volumes of the depositions are still pre- 
served at Trinity College, Dublin. The 
indictment they furnish is a truly appall- 
ing one. Sir John says: "If we shall 
take a Survey of primitive Times and 
look into the Sufferings of the first Chris- 



The Ulster Plantation 39 

tians, that suffered under the Tyranny and 
cruel Persecution of those heathenish 
Emperors, we shall certainly not find any 
one Kingdom where more Christians 
suffered, or more unparalleled Cruelties 
were acted in many years upon them, than 
were in Ireland within the space of the 
first two Months after the breaking out 
of this Rebellion .... to let in death 
among an innocent, unprovoking, un- 
resisting people, who had always lived 
peaceably with them, administering all 
manner of Helps and Comforts to those 
who were in Distress: that made no 
Difference between them and those of 
their own Nation, but even cherished them 
as Friends and loving Neighbours, with- 
out giving any Cause of Unkindness or 
Distaste unto them." 

The crime of the Protestants, however. 



40 The Soul of Ulster 

was not unneighbourly conduct, but the 
fact of their presence in a foreign land. 
They were aliens, and the elimination of 
aliens has always been the first item on 
the official Nationalist programme. They 
take up room. 

The destruction of an entire colony is 
no light task. Its thorough accomplish- 
ment, at a period when powder and shot 
were too good to waste, necessitated the 
free use of fire and water. All the princi- 
pal Ulster rivers — where accessible — were 
called into service. At Portadown over 
1,000 were, at one time or another, 
drowned in the River Bann, where the 
bridge was broken down in the middle, 
and the victims thrust in with pikes from 
both sides. We have a similar scene 
recorded at the River Toll in Armagh, 
where a number were drowned near 



The Ulster Plantation 41 

Loughgall. Two hundred were piked and 
flung into the Tyrone Blackwater, which 
for a time ran red with blood; 180 were 
drowned at the bridge of Gallon, and 100 
in a lough at Ballymacilmurrogh; 300 
were drowned in one day in a millpool 
at Killamoon. Where no more suitable 
water was available, parties were driven 
to bog-holes, where they were held under 
with pikes till dead. 

These drownings point to a certain dis- 
position on the part of the natives — at 
any rate at the first — to carry out the 
killings as rapidly and mercifully as cir- 
cumstances w^ould permit. It must be 
remembered that they were acting under 
orders, and these orders must often have 
been embarrassing from their wholesale 
nature. For example, Phelim O'Neil, 
the head of the movement, after being 



42 The Soul of Ulster 

repulsed from the Castle of Augher, 
ordered all the Protestants in the three 
adjacent parishes to be at once massacred, 
irrespective of age or sex. Such an order 
would almost necessitate some compre- 
hensive scheme of execution. O'Neil, 
who is described as a weak creature 
entirely devoid of personal courage, in- 
variably signalized his defeats in the field 
by an indiscriminate massacre of all the 
helpless victims within reach. After his 
defeat at Lisburn, he, in revenge, 
butchered Lord Caulfield, who had just 
been hospitably entertaining him, and 
fifty others with him. 

Fire, though obviously less merciful 
than water, also proved a useful agent of 
quick destruction — 152 men, women and 
children were burnt in the Castle of 
Lisgool in Fermanagh; 22 in a thatched 



The Ulster Plantation 43 

house at Kilmore, in Armagh; 26 at 
Langale, in the same county, and a number 
in the church at Blackwaterstown. The 
trouble was that the houses in which the 
refugees had taken shelter would not 
always burn, in which cases more circuit- 
ous methods had to be adopted. 

"Now for such of the English as stood 
upon their Guard, and had gathered 
together, though but in small Numbers, 
the Irish had recourse to their ancient 
Stratagem, which, as they have formerly, 
so they still continue to make frequent 
use of in this Rebellion; and that was 
fairly to offer unto them good Conditions 
of Quarter, to assure them their Lives, 
their Goods and free Passage, with a safe 
Conduct into what Place soever they 
pleased, and to confirm these Covenants 
sometimes under their Hands and Seals, 



44 The Soul of Ulster 

sometimes with deep Oaths and Protesta- 
tions; and then, as soon as they had them 
in their Power, to hold themselves dis- 
obliged from their Promises, and to leave 
their soldiers at Liberty to despoil, strip 
and murder them at their Pleasure." 

These tactics were adopted with com- 
plete success by Rory McGuire at Tullah, 
and at Liffenskeagh in Co. Fermanagh; 
by Phelim O'Neil and his brother Tullach 
at the Cathedral of Armagh, and by 
Phil O'Riley at Belterbert, at Newtown 
Church and at Longford Castle. In every 
case all those who surrendered under 
promise of safe conduct were stripped and 
butchered. 

The apparent disposition on the part 
of the natives to despatch the earlier of 
their victims quickly and mercifully was 
not long-lived. After the first big batches 



The Ulster Plantation 45 

of captives had been got rid of by drown- 
ing or burning, some very horrible forms 
of death were devised for small detached 
parties, the details of which are too revolt- 
ing for reproduction. Women and 
children would seem to have been the 
worst sufferers, and on the side of the 
natives the gentler sex and even the 
children joined eagerly in the horrible 
work. One small boy was heard to boast 
that his arm was so wearied with hacking 
and stabbing that he could not raise it. 

Sir John Temple comments on the 
apparent want of defensive organization 
and coherence among the British settlers, 
and explains this by pointing out that in 
the first place these were completely taken 
by surprise, having so far lived on terms 
of perfect amity with the native Irish; 
and in the second place that — the farms 



46 The Soul of Ulster 

of the settlers being very much separated 
— it would have been impossible for the 
men to mass together for defence without 
abandoning their women and children 
to inevitable torture and death, so that 
they preferred to stay and die with them. 
In Derry, Coleraine and Carrickfergus 
the English settlers were able to concen- 
trate in certain numbers, and on these 
places no attempts were made by the 
natives. The latter, according to Sir John 
Temple, would appear to have been better 
murderers than fighters. On the last day 
of December, 1641, a small force, con- 
sisting of one regiment, was landed in 
Dublin under Sir Simon Harcourt. This 
force was shortly afterwards supplemented 
as follows: 

"Soon after a considerable Number of 
Horse as well as of Foot, sent over by 



The Ulster Plantation 47 

the Parliament in England, arrived in 
Dublin, and having in some petty en- 
counters thereabouts tried the metal of 
the Rebels, and found their Spirit of a 
poor and base Alloy, they began extremely 
to disvalue them, and would be no longer 
abased with the fabulous Reports of their 
great Strength or Numbers, which with 
much advantage they had long made 
use of. Therefore, now they began to 
seek them out in all Places, and where- 
soever they came to meet with them 
they always prevailed, even with small 
Numbers very often against great Mul- 
titudes of them, sparing not many Times 
to pursue them into the midst of their 
greatest Fastnesses, and with so great 
Success was the War prosecuted by the 
English, from the first Landing of their 
Forces out of England until September, 



48 The Soul of Ulster 

1643, as that, in all Encounters they had 
with the Rebels during that Time, they 
never received any Scorn or Defeat, but 
went on victoriously, beating them down 
in all Parts of the Kingdom." 

The actual number of the Protestant 
colonists who were massacred, or who 
died of cold and hunger, is not easy to 
arrive at. A large proportion of the 
victims were babies or young children, 
who would not be included in any recent 
census. Even the census of adults could 
be no more than approximate. Dr. (after- 
wards Sir William) Petty, one of the 
ablest men of the day, with a marked 
genius for statistics, reckoned the Pro- 
testant settlers in Ireland as numbering 
260,000 in 1641, and 150,000 in 1653, 
showing a wastage in the twelve years 
of 110,000. The latter figure is largely 



The Ulster Plantation 49 

borne out by a petition of the Irish 
Roman Catholics to James II. in 1687, 
in which they reckon the then total 
population of Ireland at 1,200,000, of 
whom 170,000 were Protestants. 

The priests in the weekly returns which 
they furnished from the various parishes 
concerned, claimed 154,000 victims be- 
tween October, 1641, and April, 1642. 
A Cork priest, named Mahoney, pub- 
lished in 1645 an "exhortation" to his 
fellow-countrymen in which he said: 
"You have already killed 150,000 enemies 
in these four or five years, as your very 
adversaries howling openly confess in their 
writings, and you do not deny. I think 
more heretic enemies have been killed; 
would that they had all been! It remains 
for you to slay all the other heretics, or 
expel them from the bounds of Ireland." 



50 The Soul of Ulster 

Mahoney's estimate, however, clearly 
includes those killed in the earlier years 
of the fighting which succeeded the 
massacre. It is probable that the great 
discrepancies between various estimates 
as to the numbers killed, arises from the 
same confusion. The actual massacre 
may be said to have been over by the 
middle of 1642, but it was succeeded by 
eleven years of ceaseless guerilla warfare 
little less bloody, during which a further 
number of the Protestant settlers in Ire- 
land undoubtedly lost their lives, and 
subsequent estimates would find it hard 
to draw a clear dividing line between the 
victims of the massacre proper, and the 
victims of the subsequent fighting. Crom- 
well himself, when interviewing the Dutch 
Ambassador in London in connection with 
the Waldensian massacres, in which some 



The Ulster Plantation 51 

Irish troops had been concerned, said that 
the natives in Ireland had butchered 
200,000 of the settlers. This figure seems, 
at first sight, at variance with Dr. Petty's 
estimate, which only shows a falling off 
of 110,000 Protestants in twelve years; 
but to this 110,000 must be added, not 
only the natural increase of the resident 
Protestants during this period, but the 
whole of Cromwell's army (36,000), and 
the many British "adventurers" who 
swelled the influx of Protestants during 
the general scramble for the forfeited 
lands which succeeded the rebellion. In 
any case, the sworn depositions — which 
can still be seen by the curious — make it 
quite clear that the massacre was not 
only of a wholesale nature, but was 
carried out with many circumstances of 
horror. 



52 The Soul of Ulster 

This rebellion was the first systematic 
attempt to exterminate the British in 
Ireland since the rising of the natives 
against the very early settlers in 1230. 
Desmond had made a personal effort in 
this direction in 1598, as to which the 
Four Masters make boast that "after 
seventeen days, not a son of a Saxon was 
left alive in the Desmond territories," 
but this patriotic effort was only local, 
O'Neil in Ulster being at the time too 
much harassed by Essex to co-operate. 

The 1641 massacre may unhesitatingly 
be put down as the most disastrous 
occurrence in the history of the island, 
for — apart from its own intrinsic horrors 
— it laid the seeds of an undying distrust 
among future generations of Colonists, 
and, in its own generation, it brought in 
its train twelve years of unintermittent 



The Ulster Plantation 53 

civil warfare. These twelve years proved 
the most devastating Ireland had known. 
All the worst passions of men were let 
loose. Reprisals followed on atrocities, 
and further atrocities followed the re- 
prisals. On the top of both came famine 
and plague, and, by the time peace was 
finally established, nearly a third of the 
total population of Ireland had perished. 
"The cause of the war," says Petty, 
"was the desire of the Romanists to 
recover the Church revenue, worth about 
£110,000 per annum, and of the common 
Irish to get back all the Englishmen's 
estates, and of the ten or twelve grandees 
to get the empire of the whole. But, as 
for the bloodshed of the contest, God 
knows best who did occasion it." 

In Ulster, which was the principal scene 
of the massacre, the affair was largely 



54 The Soul of Ulster 

engineered by Phelim O'Neil, whose aim 
was, of course, to get back the O'Neil 
estates, which had been forfeited as the 
result of thirty years of brigandage and 
broken covenants on the part of first 
Shane, and then Hugh. 



THE CROMWELLIAN 
SETTLEMENT 



A T the end of eight years of carnage, 
'^ ^ Cromwell landed at Dublin in 
1649. His military genius at once made 
itself felt. Order and system took the 
place of independent guerilla warfare, and 
a permanent settlement seemed at length 
within sight. Ireton succeeded Cromwell, 
and Coote and Monro succeeded Ireton, 
but it was four years after Cromwell's 
landing before peace was finally estab- 
lished. 

Irish writers are fond of stigmatizing 
Cromwell's regime as a reign of terror, 
but, as a matter of fact, this was not so. 
He was scrupulously just in his dealings 
with the natives, and never brutal. His 

57 



58 The Soul of Ulster 

first act on landing was to publish a 
general order that no violence should be 
done to any persons not in arms with 
the enemy: that soldiers taking goods 
without payment should be punished ac- 
cording to the articles of war, and that 
officers who allowed this rule to be dis- 
obeyed should forfeit their commissions. 
These rules were strictly adhered to. 
Soldiers were hung for stealing chickens, 
and no act of rapine passed unpunished. 
Ireton, who succeeded Cromwell, was, if 
anything, more punctilious. 

It is more than probable that, in his 
own day, Cromwell was respected and 
even admired by the natives, as such 
men invariably are in Ireland. Rowley 
Lascelles, who in the early part of the 
nineteenth century was appointed by the 
Government to examine the Irish State 



The Cromwellian Settlement 59 

Records and Rolls, reported that his 
examination led him to the belief that 
Cromwell's Government was the most 
popular Ireland has ever known. He 
was no promiscuous butcher, like Coote. 
At Drogheda and Wexford he was un- 
doubtedly severe, but only with such 
severity as was recognized by the then 
usages of war. In the case of Drogheda, 
the town was summoned to surrender 
unconditionally. Aston, the Governor, 
who had stored within the city large 
supplies of food and munitions, refused, 
thinking that Cromwell would follow the 
traditional procedure in such cases, and 
sit down before the town for a protracted 
siege which might end anyhow. Crom- 
well, however, who was no respecter of 
traditional methods, outraged all calcula- 
tions by immediately assaulting the town. 



60 The Soul of Ulster 

Twice he was repulsed, but the third 
assault, led by himself, was successful. 
All those found in arms were put to the 
sword, and of those that surrendered, one 
out of every ten was shot and the re- 
mainder deported to Barbadoes. Very 
much the same programme was carried 
out at Wexford, to the immense surprise 
of the garrison, who were not used to such 
energetic forms of warfare. The effect 
in Ireland of these two swift strokes was 
electrical. All the principal towns hauled 
down their flags, and were treated with 
a leniency which was new to Ireland. 

The strong probability is that Cromwell 
owes his unpopularity with Irish writers 
of the Prendergast type, not to his 
severity with the sword, but to his banish- 
ment of the natives across the Shannon. 
By this edict he became in great measure 



The Cromwellian Settlement 61 

the official father of the grievance which 
is the starting point of all Ireland's 
Philippics against England and English 
rule. He made it possible for the first 
time for the native lands to be occupied 
with security by Protestant colonists from 
across the water. James I.'s scheme, as 
an act of permanent plantation, may be 
said to have failed, for half the settlers 
had been butchered, and the rest driven 
to concentrate for protection in such 
towns as Enniskillen, Derry, Coleraine and 
Carrickfergus. The dreadful fate of the 
immigrants of forty years before could 
not but scare the mere agriculturalist 
from any desire he might otherwise have 
had to make Ulster his home. It was 
clear that the goodwill of the natives 
could not be won by individual acts of 
kindness. All such were outweighed, and. 



62 The Soul of Ulster 

indeed, wholly neutralized hy the initial 
act of usurpation. Nothing could have 
been more conciliatory than the James I. 
settlers, but their conciliation had counted 
for nothing in face of the one salient fact 
that they were in arbitrary occupation of 
Irish soil. This has always been the 
Irish attitude of mind, and is, in fact, 
the keynote of the whole Irish question. 
It explains why neither local charities 
nor national concessions elicit so much 
as a glimmer of gratitude from those 
who benefit by them. What call is there 
for gratitude towards those who dole 
back in fragments that which they 
originally stole en bloc? 

It was evident, then, that friendly over- 
tures on the part of the British Colonists 
could make no permanent impression on 
the native mind, which was incapable of 



The Cromwellian Settlement 63 

seeing anything beyond the main fact 
of dispossession. This left two courses 
only open: either the evacuation of Irish 
lands by the Protestants, or the re- 
colonization of the eastern half of Ireland 
under conditions which would ensure se- 
curity of life and property to the colonists. 
Cromwell preferred the latter course. The 
bulk of the native population was banished 
to the west of Ireland, only such numbers 
being retained in the east as would keep 
the land tilled without acting as a stand- 
ing menace. There was to be no possi- 
bility of a recurrence of 1641. 

Cromwell's act has secured for him the 
undying hatred of the native Irish, because 
it laid the foundation stone of colonial 
stability in Ireland; but there can be 
no doubt that it was a statesmanlike 
measure, had it only been carried out in 



64 The Soul of Ulster 

a more practical manner; and it was a 
measure which was morally justified by 
the fact of the recent massacre. The 
natives outnumbered the colonists by six 
to one, and in the face of recent experi- 
ences, no more British agriculturalists 
could be expected to settle in east Ireland 
unless the great mass of the natives were 
removed to a safe distance. Cromwell 
foresaw all these things, and took his 
measures accordingly, but in detail his 
scheme proved unworkable. The first step 
was the forfeiture of the lands of all those 
implicated in the late rebellion, who were 
bidden to betake themselves across the 
Shannon. By this edict over 2,000,000 
acres became forfeit. This figure included 
not only native Irish lands, but the lands 
of prominent Royalists, and "ma- 
lignants." Glebe and Crown lands were 



The Cromwellian Settlement 65 

also confiscated, and thrown into the 
conmion basket with the lands of the 
rebels. An elaborate and costly survey, 
under the direction of Sir William Petty, 
followed, after which came the question 
of distribution. 

Here was the real trouble. The 
general idea was that the lands should 
be divided among the Cromwellian soldiers 
in satisfaction of their four years' arrears 
of pay, and also among those who had 
advanced money to finance the expedition. 
This, on the face of it, was as it should 
be, but when it came to paying 36,000 
soldiers, to whom varying amounts were 
due, with allotments of land of very 
varying value, the difficulties of just 
dealing were felt to be insurmountable. 
In the end it was decided (with the army 
consenting) that the distribution should 



6Q The Soul of Ulster 

be by lot: each regiment taking its pay- 
in the meadows, bogs or mountains, as 
the case might be, of the particular dis- 
trict for whose subjugation it had been 
responsible. Munster lands were valued 
at 12s. per acre, Leinster at 8s., and 
Ulster at 4s., figures which are of no 
small interest in view of the relative 
prosperity of the three Provinces to-day. 
The scheme was worked out with military 
precision, but as a Land Act it was fore- 
doomed to failure. 

The Ironsides were great soldiers, but 
they were not agriculturalists, and in 
most cases they were only too glad to 
barter their newly-acquired lands for a 
lump sum down. Their officers and many 
of the old residents took advantage of the 
soldiers' difficulties to build up big estates 
at small cost to themselves, and the 



The Cromwellian Settlement 67 

prime object of the settlement was on the 
high road to defeat even before the 
death of the Commonwealth. In place 
of a militant British population evenly 
distributed over the whole of the newly- 
forfeited lands, the year 1660 saw a 
scattered British population working lands 
of unwieldy extent with the aid of the 
very natives who had lately been dis- 
possessed of them. Unnatural conditions 
such as these could only breed trouble, 
and it was not long before the native 
labourers by day became Tories or 
Rapparees by night, maiming, killing or 
burning the live and dead stock of those 
they worked for. 

The accession of Charles II. still further 
added to the confusion and unrest. This 
episcopalian Monarch confirmed the Crom- 
wellian Settlement as a whole, but restored 



68 The Soul of Ulster 

many of the native proprietors to their 
forfeited lands, and, as was only to be 
expected, handed back to the Bishops 
and Protestant Church generally the glebe 
lands of which Cromwell the Nonconfor- 
mist had mulcted them. This pious act 
deprived many of the Ironsides of the 
lands to which they considered them- 
selves justly entitled in respect of their 
four years' unpaid service in Ireland, 
and — seeing nothing on the horizon but 
the accession of the Roman Catholic Duke 
of York — ^thousands of these sturdy non- 
conformists emigrated to America, there 
to found that remarkable New England 
society so famous in romance and verse. 

Although the Cromwellian Settlement 
may be said to have failed of its full 
intention, its effect on the ultimate 
Ulster question, i.e.^ the relations existing 



The Cromwellian Settlement 69 

between the native Irish and the British 
Colonists, was very far reaching. The 
Calvinistic tendencies of the new Settlers 
accentuated more than ever the im- 
passable social and religious barrier be- 
tween the two races. Intermarriage with 
the natives had always been forbidden 
by law from the earliest days of British 
colonization in Ireland. In 1367 the law 
was so strict that any colonist marrying 
a native Irish woman was liable to be 
hanged, drawn and quartered. Ireton 
himself pronounced the direst penalties 
against any who should so offend. But, 
however much such stern measures may 
have been called for in Munster and 
Leinster, there was no need for them in 
Ulster. Here there were Protestant girls 
in plenty, and there was no disposition 
on the part of such Ironsides as remained 



70 The Soul of Ulster 

and settled to look beyond these. 
Prendergast quotes a stanza which well 
illustrates the mental attitude of the 
seventeenth century settlers, and, indeed, 
of their descendants to-day in the 
twentieth century. 

" rather than turne 

From English principles would sooner burne, 

And rather than marrie an Irish wife, 

Would batchellars remain for tearme of life." 

On the side of the natives there was 
no such prejudice. Intermarriage had 
been the admitted cause of the failure of 
all previous attempts to implant British 
ideas and British customs in Ireland by 
means of colonization. Intermarriage 
was, therefore, the obvious weapon with 
which to defeat the intended effect of the 
Cromwellian Settlement. By the laws of 
the Roman Catholic Church the children 
of mixed marriages must always be 



The Cromwellian Settlement 71 

brought up as Catholics, so that the 
interests of the priests lay very palpably 
in that direction. A standing testimony 
to the stern resistance of the colonists to 
the allurements of the native girls is to 
be found in present-day Ulster's 800,000 
Protestants, all of whom would to-day 
be profitable members of the Church of 
Rome, had their forbears at any time 
through the centuries yielded to the 
charms of the native daughters of Erin. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



r llHE modern Ulster question may 
-*- be said to have germinated on 
the 23rd of October, 1641, a date solemnly- 
commemorated for many years afterwards 
among the natives. Prior to this la- 
mentable outbreak, religious antagonism 
had been merely clerical; from that date 
on it became political. Evidence of this 
changed spirit was soon forthcoming. 

The wholesale emigration of the Ironsides 
under the heavy burden of the Restora- 
tion, though a serious blow to the fighting 
power of the settlers, still left them 
sufficiently strong to be safe from open 
attack; but there were other means 

76 



76 The Soul of Ulster 

open to the natives by which they could 
make life unprofitable and unpalatable. 
The Rapparees had made their appear- 
ance as early as the first allotment of 
forfeited lands in 1655, but, till the 
accession of James II., they could hardly 
be said to have constituted a real menace 
to the settlers. These were armed and 
well capable of self-defence. But with 
the last of the Stuarts on the throne 
there came drastic and ominous changes, 
eloquent to future generations of the 
basic principles of Home Rule. The Pro- 
testant settlers were deprived of all civil 
and executive offices, and, at the instance 
of the national councils, were forbidden 
under pain of death to carry or possess 
arms. The native Roman Catholics were 
not disarmed, and the boldness of the 
Rapparees increased in exact ratio to 



The Civil War 77 

the helplessness of the settlers to defend 
themselves. These were now harassed 
and persecuted in every conceivable way. 
Their stock was mutilated or carried off, 
their crops destroyed. Men were executed 
for having in their houses arms which 
the search parties had themselves con- 
cealed there. There can be no doubt 
that had James' short (two and a half 
years) reign been prolonged by so much 
as one year, the scenes of 1641 would 
have been re-enacted. All the native 
interests, religious and political, were 
working up to that pious end, when the 
deus ex machina suddenly burst on the 
scene in the person of William of Orange, 
son-in-law to James and claimant to his 
throne. 

The worst possibilities of the situation 
were now averted, but the trials of the 



78 The Soul of Ulster 

settlers were by no means at an end. 
The Rapparees were strong in numbers 
and fully armed, and their suppression 
was a slow process. They were finally 
extirpated by the primitive device of 
putting a price on their heads. The 
effect was instantaneous. The receiving 
stations were almost embarrassed by the 
numbers of heads that daily arrived on 
the scene. "The Irish bring them in;" 
reported Major Morgan, who was re- 
sponsible for the idea; "brothers and 
cousins cut one another's throats." The 
plan was not a pretty one, but it worked. 
Within twelve months of the posting of 
the notice, the bulk of the Rapparees 
were no more, and the survivors were 
correspondingly prosperous. 

The appearance of William of Orange 
on the political horizon of Ulster was 



The Civil War 79 

sensational in its results. In the eyes of 
the Protestants he was from the first 
the lawful king, and organized resistance 
without treason was now for the first 
time possible. The armed bands of James 
were, however, still very much in the 
ascendant. Tyrconnell had a force of 
40,000 well-equipped men, and there was 
no organized army on the other side 
with which to oppose him. The dis- 
armament of the Protestants had been 
thorough, and their re-equipment was 
necessarily a gradual process. 

The first collective stand of the per- 
secuted settlers was of a highly dramatic 
nature. The city of Derry, or London- 
derry, as it was now called, had always 
been prominent in Ulster politics. It 
had been very conspicuous as a Pro- 
testant stronghold during O'Dogherty's 



80 The Soul of Ulster 

1608 rebellion; and during the massacres 
of 1641 and 1642 it had proved a safe 
and sure sanctuary for all the scattered 
settlers from the surrounding district; 
and now, in 1689, it was destined to make 
itself famous for ever by a defence which 
stands out as one of the most gallant and 
stirring achievements in the history of 
the world. 

On December 9th James' forces were 
seen approaching the city from across the 
Foyle, and the Town Council, meeting in 
hasty conclave, decided that the city was 
indefensible and must be surrendered. 
Some apprentice boys of the town, how- 
ever, thought differently, and, taking the 
matter into their own hands, shut the 
gates in the very faces of James' aston- 
ished troops, who thereupon marched off 
to Coleraine without firing a shot. This 



The Civil War 81 

act on the part of the " 'Prentice Boys" 
is still commemorated in Derry on each 
successive 9th December, and the name of 
Crookshanks, Spike, Campsis and Sher- 
rard are still, and ever will be, famous in 
the Maiden City. 

The consequences of this daring defiance 
of James II. were not long in falling on 
the little town, which four months later 
found itself invested by James himself 
with an army of 25,000 men, including 
5,000 French under de Rosen. 

In the meanwhile the inhabitants had 
been making such preparations as lay in 
their powder, and a defence was now set 
up which stands out to this day as the one 
episode of military heroism in the history 
of Ireland. The Governor, Lundy, was 
suspected of treachery and expelled from 
the city, and a clergyman named George 



82 The Soul of Ulster 

Walker was elected to take his place. 
Under his leadership the gallant little 
town held out for three months, under 
circumstances of appalling hardship. 
Famine and sword reduced the effective 
garrison from 7,500 to 3,000; 10,000 of 
the civil population (two-thirds of the 
total number) died of hunger or disease, 
but "no surrender" was still the watch- 
word of the gaunt skeletons that manned 
the walls. Finally, on July 30th, when 
the few survivors were at their very last 
gasp. Kirk with three store ships and a 
frigate broke the boom across the Foyle, 
and Derry was relieved. 

Derry and Enniskillen, so far, had been 
the only towns in Ireland which had 
refused submission to James II., but, with 
the firm establishment of Williaip. on the 
English throne, the work of recovering 



The Civil War 83 

Ireland was promptly taken in hand. 
Schomberg landed at Carrickfergus with 
an army of 20,000, composed of French 
mercenaries and raw English levies, and, 
marching south, cleared the country as 
far as Dundalk, where he entrenched 
himself. Here he lay inactive for the rest 
of the autumn, and in November withdrew 
with his army to Belfast. William, greatly 
incensed by this laxity on the part of 
Schomberg, now resolved to take the field 
in person, and in June of the following 
year he crossed the channel and took over 
command. James was in Dublin at the 
time, and, moving north with his army to 
the Boyne, he took up a strong defen- 
sive position on the right bank of that 
river, about a mile above the town of 
Drogheda. 

Here, on July 1st, the rival monarchs 



84 The Soul of Ulster 

met. The opposing forces were about 
equal in number, but the advantage in 
position was greatly in favour of the Irish, 
who acted solely on the defensive. 
William, however, forded the river, scaled 
the heights opposite, and easily dislodged 
the native army, which, after the feeblest 
show of resistance, fled to the south. 
William now returned to England, and 
Ginkel assumed command of his army in 
place of Schomberg, who had fallen at 
the Boyne. The Irish army, retreating 
southwards, took up a strong position on 
the hill of Aughrim, near Ballinasloe, a 
hill surrounded on all sides by bogs, and 
difficult of approach. They numbered 
25,000 and were commanded by St. Ruth, 
a French general of high repute. Ginkel 
had only 18,000 troops, but he attacked 
the hill with complete confidence and 



The Civil War 85 

totally routed the defenders, who scattered 
and took to flight in all directions. 
This victory was shortly followed by the 
surrender of the Irish garrison at 
Limerick, and the war was at an end. 

The Irish war between William and 
James can hardly be classed as a religious 
war. It is true that, with hardly any 
exceptions, the Protestants were on the 
side of William and the native Roman 
Catholics on that of James, but the real 
cause of quarrel lay in no question of 
doctrine, but in a dispute between two 
Princes as to the right to the English 
throne. The effect of the war, however, 
was undoubtedly to heighten the barrier 
already existing, and to increase the 
bitterness between the two races living 
side by side in the one island. Open 
hostilities, at no time congenial to the 



86 The Soul of Ulster 

native temperament, were at an end, but 
in their wake followed the stealthy mid- 
night houghings and burnings which have 
always played so conspicuous a part in 
the Irish struggle for independence. The 
Rapparees had been put down by 
methods which have already been de- 
scribed, but their place was taken by 
various patriotic Societies organized on 
the same lines. In 1711 a secret society 
known as the "Houghers" appeared in 
Connaught, with the usual programme 
of maiming and mutilation of farm stock. 
All the victims were Protestants, and 
no convictions could be obtained. In 
1761 the "Whiteboys" appeared in 
Tipperary. This was a purely Roman 
Catholic Society, organized and officered 
by priests. Like all similar societies in 
Ireland, it worked solely by night, and 



The Civil War 87 

it perhaps excelled all others in the 
hideous cruelty which characterized its 
outrages. For five and twenty years it 
terrorized the entire country. 



THE 1798 REBELLION 



T N 1791 was founded the United Irish- 
^ men's League. Its prima facie in- 
spiration was the French Revolution, 
which at the time was supposed to be 
setting the world a practical example of 
the potentialities of oppressed humanity 
against organized tyranny. 

The movement in its opening stages 
was — as its name indicates — non-sectarian. 
The Presbyterians of Ulster, at that time, 
numbered some 100,000, and under an 
intolerant Episcopalianism, their griev- 
ances as loyal and law-abiding subjects 
were very real. They could also, with 
perfect justice, complain of other most 
substantial grievances, both agrarian and 

91 



92 The Soul of Ulster 

commercial; so that, what with one thing 
and another, they were in a perilously ripe 
state for any justifiable agitation against 
authority. 

The ostensible aim of the movement 
was to bring these Northern Presbyterians, 
greatly discontented at the moment, into 
line with the Roman Catholic natives 
who were always discontented, and so 
present a common face to the English 
Government. But there was more in it 
than this, as very soon became apparent. 
In those days a very definite gap separated 
the Presbyterians from the members of 
the Church of Ireland. At the present 
day both denominations are loosely 
bracketted together as "Protestants," but 
it was far otherwise at the end of the 
eighteenth century; and the primary 
design of the native Roman Catholics 



The 1798 Rebellion 93 

was to utilize the Presbyterian strength 
against the Episcopalian Protestants; 
after which the Presbyterians themselves 
could have been dealt with easily enough. 

This simple scheme was naturally not 
made public. The United Irishmen 
orators were — as Irishmen always are — 
impassioned, eloquent and even plausible, 
and it was some time before the sinister 
designs behind their smooth utterances 
began to be suspected. In the mean- 
while many Home County Protestants 
of good family joined the League, which 
for a time presented all the appearance 
of a national movement. 

In the Irish Parliament the situation 
was much debated, many well-meaning 
Protestant members taking the line that 
the movement was genuine and justifiable, 
and, in fact, all that it represented itself 



94 The Soul of Ulster 

to be. To these the usual words of 
warning were given by those who were 
more clear-sighted. During the dis- 
cussion in 1793 on the bill for the removal 
of Catholic disabilities, Dr. Duigenan 
made a statement which — considering the 
source from which it came — may be taken 
as the most momentous pronouncement 
on the Irish question which has ever been 
uttered. Dr. Duigenan was of the 
humblest origin. Born in a cabin, of a 
native Roman Catholic family, he was 
reared and educated — like all those around 
him — as a Catholic, but later on, for 
political reasons, adopted Protestantism. 
"The Irish Catholics," he said, "to a 
man esteem all Protestants as usurpers 
of their estates. To this day they settle 
those estates on the marriage of their 
sons and daughters. They have accurate 



The 1798 Rebellion 95 

maps of them. They have lately published 
in Dublin a map of this kingdom can- 
toned out among the old proprietors. 
They abhor all Protestants and all English- 
men as plunderers and oppressors, 
exclusive of their detestation of them as 
heretics. If the Parliament of this country 
can be so infatuated as to put the Irish 
Catholics on a better footing than the 
English Catholics, and if the English 
nation shall countenance such a frenzy, 
either this Kingdom will be for ever 
severed from the British Empire, or it 
must be again conquered by a British 
Army. The Protestants of Ireland are 
but the British garrison in an enemy's 
country, and if deserted by the parent 
state must surrender at discretion. 
English ministers are simply blind. I 
tell them they are greatly deceived if 



96 The Soul of Ulster 

they have been induced to believe that 
an Irish Catholic is, ever was, or ever will 
be, a loyal subject of a British Protestant 
King, or a Protestant Government." 

The extraordinary educational value of 
this utterance lies in the fact that it is a 
disclosure from within, by one of the 
natives, of the secret soul of the Irish 
people. 

It was not long before there was 
further confirmation of Dr. Duigenan's 
warning. Later on in the same year 
the entire south-west corner of Ireland 
rose simultaneously, and a number of 
outrages were committed on Protestant 
farmers and clergymen. The rising was 
easily quelled, and at Carrick a number of 
prisoners were taken. These volunteered 
the information that, when matters were 
rather more ripe, all the Protestants and 



The 1798 Rebellion 97 

Presbyterians in Ireland were to be killed 
in one night. Disclosures such as these 
began to open the eyes of the Ulster 
Presbyterians to the precipice towards 
which they had been drifting. There 
were other disquieting signs, too, in the 
firmament. For some time past bands 
of midnight ruffians, describing themselves 
as Defenders, had been terrorizing the 
agriculturists of Ulster. So far these had 
not been identified with the United 
Irishmen, but that was shortly to come. 
In January, 1791, they broke into the 
house of Mr. Alexander Barclay, a school- 
master at Forkhill, near Dundalk. They 
tightened a cord round his neck till his 
tongue protruded, which they then cut 
out. They cut off the four fingers and 
thumb of his right hand, after which they 
proceeded to treat his wife in exactly the 



98 The Soul of Ulster 

same way. Her brother, a boy of thir- 
teen, had arrived that morning from 
Armagh on a visit. They cut out his 
tongue and the calf of his right leg, and 
left them all in that condition. 

This outrage was entirely unprovoked. 
Barclay was not only inoffensive but 
philanthropic, for he taught thirty chil- 
dren in the village gratis. His supposed 
offence was teaching in a school of which 
the Defenders — i.e,. Defenders of the 
Roman Catholic faith — did not approve. 
All the native Irish in the village ex- 
ulted openly over this hideous act, as 
though it had been some glorious feat of 
arms. 

The Defenders continued their depreda- 
tions for some time before they were 
finally identified with the United Irish- 
men. The moment this identity was 



The 1798 Rebellion 99 

established, and it became generally 
known that the United Irishmen by day 
became Defenders by night, outraging 
the persons and property of those with 
whom they were nominally "united," the 
movement was dead, as far as the Ulster 
Presbyterians were concerned. The name, 
however, was still retained on account of 
its plausible sound. 

The outrages perpetrated by the De- 
fenders soon became so unendurable that, 
in self-defence, the Ulstermen started a 
counter-organization, known as "Peep-o'- 
Day Boys," mainly composed of Presby- 
terians. The relations between Protestant 
and Catholic were now at the breaking- 
point, and in September, 1795, matters 
may be said to have culminated in a 
miniature battle which was fought at a 
village in Tyrone, known as the Diamond. 



100 The Soul of Ulster 

The Catholics, who were the aggressors, 
outnumbered the Protestants by more 
than two to one, but they were completely 
routed, leaving 48 of their number dead 
upon the field. 

On the same night the Orange Lodge 
was instituted. This Society was a purely 
defensive organization, which was called 
into being out of a most acute necessity 
for some combined front to be shown, by 
a persecuted minority, to those whose 
avowed object and boast now was their 
total extermination. It was not long 
before it had enrolled 20,000 sturdy and 
determined men, and there can be very 
little doubt that it was the existence of 
this body, ready at any time to face and 
defeat more than double their number, as 
they had at the Diamond, that alone 
deterred the natives from an attempt to 



The 1798 Rebellion 101 

repeat the scenes of 1641. Later on, 
when the rebellion actually did break out, 
the Orangemen served as yeomanry, and 
were of incalculable service to a govern- 
ment which at the time hardly knew 
which way to turn for reliable troops. 

The Orange Lodge took its name in 
honour of William III., and the adoption 
of the colour naturally followed on the 
adoption of the name. It is, however, 
interesting to bear in mind that, at the 
battle of the Boyne, William's colours had 
been green, and James's white. There is 
something peculiarly Hibernian in the 
thought that the wearing of the green was 
instituted by the man whose name no 
good Catholic ever mentions without some 
pious expression of hope as to the tem- 
perature of his present surroundings. 

The rebellion which had been smoulder- 



102 The Soul of Ulster 

ing for seven years actually broke into 
flame in 1798. 

To the student of Irish Politics who 
looks below the surface, there is no episode 
in the history of the island more in- 
structive, or that holds up a more minatory 
hand to the half-informed, than this 
rebellion. 

The initial success of the movement was 
due in great part to the organizing energies 
and influence of such Protestant gentlemen 
as Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Bagenal 
Harvey. No sooner, however, was the 
rebellion on the apparent high-road to 
success, than the mask was thrown off, a 
holy war was proclaimed, priests assumed 
the command of the rebel army, and the 
extermination of the Protestants became 
the avowed aim of the victorious in- 
surgents. Roman Catholic ceremonies 



The 1798 Rebellion 103 

preceded all actions. The murder of 
Protestants was solemnly blessed as an 
act pleasing to God. 

For one whole month in Wexford, Wick- 
low and Kildare the rebellion ran riot. 
The insurgent army could boast 30,000 
well-armed men. Vinegar Hill was made 
its Headquarters. Here, day after day, 
batches of unoffending Protestants were 
brought in, tried before a mock tribunal, 
and butchered in cold blood. The scenes 
enacted on this hill recall the worst 
episodes of the French Revolution. In 
France the victims were butchered because 
they were aristocrats; at Vinegar Hill 
they were butchered because they were 
Protestants, or, in other words, foreigners. 
Everything was done to a fitting accom- 
paniment of prayers, genuflections, and 
holy water. But there were worse deeds 



104 The Soul of Ulster 

even than the deeds done on Vinegar Hill. 
In Kildare Mr. Crafford and one of his 
young children were impaled on pikes 
and roasted alive before a slow fire. One 
hundred and eighty-four men, women and 
children were imprisoned in a barn at 
a village known as Scullabogue. When 
news came on June 4th that the fight at 
Ross was going against the rebels, orders 
were issued to at once kill all the 
prisoners. This was done by setting fire 
to the barn, and all within it perished 
miserably. Two or three of the native 
Catholics who protested against the horrid 
act were themselves tossed into the flames 
on the points of pikes. This deed forcibly 
recalls similar acts at Lisgool, Kilmore, 
and Langale one hundred and fifty years 
earlier. There is a further striking analogy 
between the butcheries on the Bann at 



The 1798 Rebellion 105 

Portadown in 1641 and that at Wexford 
Bridge in 1798. The latter showed a 
distinct advance in brutality. At Port- 
adown the bridge had been broken down 
in the middle and the victims were simply 
forced by pike-points into the water. At 
Wexford Bridge two men in front and two 
behind thrust their pikes into the victim's 
body and, lifting it up, held it writhing on 
the points till the arms of the executioners 
wearied and the body was tossed over the 
parapet. Ninety-seven met their death 
in this way on June 20th. The pro- 
ceedings were then mercifully cut short 
by a report that Vinegar Hill was being 
attacked, whereupon the butchers made 
off. 

At the end of a month the triumphant 
career of the rebels was cut short by 
General Lake, who collected an army of 



106 The Soul of Ulster 

very mixed elements and utterly defeated 
the rebels within a stone's throw of their 
headquarters. The leaders were hanged, 
and Ireland settled down once more 
to a state of apparent tranquillity. Irish 
Roman Catholics and Anglo-Saxon Pro- 
testants dug the fields side by side, but 
in each there was an inherent and in- 
eradicable distrust of the other — a distrust 
born of different temperament, different 
race, different interests and different 
religion, but — before all else, born of 
historical facts. '98 and '41 were not 
forgotten. 



ULSTER TO-DAY 



r I IHE above brief historical sketch 
^ brings us to the Ulster of to-day, 
and broadly explains the political attitude 
of the two sections of the population in 
that little understood Province. The 
Protestant attitude is often stigmatized 
as being uncompromising. It is un- 
compromising. There is probably no 
community in the world where political 
sentiment is more united and more deeply 
rooted. It may also be claimed that 
there is no community in the world where 
the political opinions held are more 
logically justified by anyone who takes 
the trouble to investigate the facts. Few 



109 



110 The Soul of Ulster 

people do. The fundamental idea at the 
back of the Ulsterman's attitude is that 
what has once happened may well happen 
again. It is argued that when, through- 
out a period of several hundred years, 
certain occurrences have invariably suc- 
ceeded the opportunity for such occur- 
rences, it is not unreasonable to assume 
that — given the same opportunities — the 
same occurrences will again make 
appearance. 

When such occurrences invariably take 
the form of systematic attempts to rid 
the country of the British element by any 
and every means, it is only natural that 
those chiefly interested should be strongly 
opposed to the introduction of any fresh 
opportunities for such attempts. It is a 
pity that English politicians, who think 
to settle the Irish question with smirks 



Ulster To-day 111 

and smiles, do not in the first instance 
make study of the historical facts which 
govern the situation. Through these they 
might then get not only a truer sense of 
values but an illuminating glimpse into 
the soul of the Irish people. They might 
ultimately arrive at the great truth that 
the soul of the native Irish has not at 
the present day changed by the width of 
a hair from what it was in 1641, and again 
in 1798. They would then understand 
why all their smirks and smiles are thrown 
away; why all conciliatory measures fail 
to conciliate, or to elicit the faintest 
spark of gratitude. The reason is that 
they do not so much as touch the fringe 
of the real grievance, which is briefly the 
existence on Irish soil of a million and a 
quarter of British colonists. This million 
and a quarter are variously known in 



112 The Soul of Ulster 

England as the Irish Loyalists, the Irish 
Unionists, or the Irish Protestants; some- 
times as Ulstermen, or even more vaguely 
as "Orangemen." But to the native 
Irish mind they simply represent the one 
unspeakable evil, that is to say, the British 
Usurper. 

The only attraction of Home Rule to 
the inner soul of the Irish (especially in 
Ulster) is the hope that it will provide 
the machinery by which the British 
colonists can be got rid of and Irish soil 
revert once more to the Irish. 

Even a partial realization of this salient 
fact must make clear the utter fatuity of 
the pretty pictures which represent Carson 
and Redmond as shaking hands and 
crying, "Irishmen all." As well draw a 
picture of Von der Goltz and King Albert 
embracing in Brussels and crying, "Bel- 



Ulster To-day 113 

gians all." Residence is not nationality; 
and when residence is forcible and un- 
welcome residence, it is the very antithesis 
of nationality. It is the accursed thing 
against which nationality revolts. 

In the Northern Province of Ireland 
we find two races living side by side, 
between whom is little sympathy, little 
temperamentally in common, and between 
whom there has never been any inter- 
mixture of blood. These two races are 
— on the one side — the original natives, 
on the other, the British colonists. The 
former are exclusively Roman Catholic, 
the latter are almost exclusively Pro- 
testant, but not quite. However, for 
general purposes of distinction, it may 
be taken as an undeviating rule that the 
Roman Catholics are the natives, and 
the Protestants the British colonists. The 



114 The Soul of Ulster 

second half of the rule, in any case, holds 
good without exception. The existence of 
these doctrinal divisions often leads the 
half-informed into the error of supposing 
that Ulster is the seat of a bitter but 
suppressed religious strife. Technically 
speaking, this is not the case at all. It 
is true the Protestants have little good 
to say of the Roman Catholics and vice 
versa, but the mutual antipathy is racial 
and not religious, only — as has already 
been explained — the religion marks the 
race, so much so, in fact, that religion 
actually stands for nationality. The Pro- 
testant, therefore, looks askance at the 
Catholic, not because of doctrinal differ- 
ences, but because he recognizes in the 
Catholic an inveterate foe nursing a 
deathless grievance. Similarly, the 
Roman Catholic scowls on the Pro- 



Ulster To-day 115 

testants not because of their supposed 
prejudice against the triple mitre at the 
Vatican, but because their Protestantism 
stamps them as usurping British colonists 
who have wrested from them the best of 
their lands. This is the Ulster question 
as it stands to-day under the Imperial 
Government. 

The Ulster question under a native 
Irish Government would be a very much 
more serious affair. We should then be 
faced with all the potential tragedies 
behind a situation in which one race 
tries, by every known means, to get rid 
of another race which does not mean 
going. An exact parallel would be fur- 
nished if the Red Indians outnumbered 
the Canadians by five to three, and if the 
Government of the Dominion were to be 
placed in the hands of the former. The 



116 The Soul of Ulster 

parallel, too, would hold good, not only 
politically but also as to the more practical 
developments which would inevitably 
follow. 

To benevolent but Boeotian politicians, 
with a knowledge of Ireland gleaned from 
patriotic fiction, or to the casual visitor 
with a judicial sense warped by flattery, 
these views may appear extravagant. To 
the Ulster Protestant they will seem such 
threadbare truths as to be hardly worth 
reciting. To him they are the A B C of 
a creed which has been handed down 
from father to son during three hundred 
years of residence in a foreign land, and to 
which the experience of each successive 
generation adds force. But the Pro- 
testant will seldom, even to his own 
brother-Protestant, draw aside the curtain 
of his soul, and show to the world the root 



Ulster To-day 117 

matter of the whole question. That root- 
matter, though it is known to all, is rarely 
bared to the eye — perhaps because all 
know that behind it lurks an ominous 
cloud, the colour of which is blood-red. 
It is, therefore, the thing which is not 
written, and not said even in whisper; 
but written here it must be, for the 
understanding of the aforesaid politician 
and casual visitor. 

When the native Irish say, "Ireland 
for the Irish," they mean what they say. 
In the South and West the cry has little 
meaning, for the Irish have Ireland. The 
foreign element is a negligible quantity, 
but a negligible quantity which scatters 
money, and is therefore not unwelcome. 
In Ulster we have a very different state 
of things. Here we find half the Province 
in the occupation of settlers who are not 



118 The Soul of Ulster 

Irish at all. The tourist, the politician, 
and many others East of the Irish Sea 
would call them Irish. They speak a 
half-Scotch lingo with an Irish brogue; 
their forbears have been in Ireland for 
over three hundred years, but for all 
that, they have not a drop of Irish blood 
in their veins. If they had, they would 
— for reasons already shown — be Roman 
Catholics. In the eyes of the natives 
they are foreigners, land-grabbers and 
enemies — in a word, the "English 
Garrison." 

In Ulster, then, the cry of "Ireland for 
the Irish" is not the mere innocent 
expression of a laudable patriotism; it 
has a deeper and a far more sinister 
meaning. It means the expulsion from 
Ireland of the Protestant colonists, and 
is so understood clearly by both sections 



Ulster To-day 119 

of the population. There are no senti- 
mental illusion^ in Ulster, whatever 
there may be in England. 

Among the Irish of the South and West, 
the popular conception of Ireland under 
Home Rule may be said to be, and, in 
fact, is, nebulous. The aspirations of the 
peasant, when reduced by persuasive 
inquiry to concrete form, will generally 
be found to stop short at a kind of Pan- 
Celtic Arcadia, where all will be rich on 
a minimum of work and a maximum of 
whisky supplied by American millionaires. 
The picture — stimulating though it is — 
excites no real enthusiasm. It is believed 
in much as a favourite fairy tale is believed 
in by a boy of eight. Get your peasant 
alone — well out of earshot of his fellows — 
and as likely as not he will blast the 
pretty picture (and, incidentally, those who 



120 The Soul of Ulster 

draw it) with a torrent of picturesquely 
obscene scorn. 

In Ulster, however, a very different 
spirit broods over the land. Here Home 
Rule holds out to the native Irish, not the 
elusive mirage of the south, but a coveted 
and substantial prize which lies under 
their very hand to pluck, and faces them 
enticingly at every turn of their daily 
labour. Half the lands of Ulster, and 
these the best and the richest, are in the 
hands of the stranger within the gates. 
It matters nothing that the lands, when 
originally granted, were waste, and that 
the industry of the colonists has made 
them rich. It matters nothing that 
Ulster was then a sink of murder, misery 
and vice, and that now it is a land of 
smiling prosperity. The natives know 
none of these things; they are not politi- 



Ulster To-day 121 

cally educated on these lines. All they 
know is that the lands were once theirs, 
and that now they are occupied by 
colonists of another race and another 
religion. And so they cry, or, rather, 
they mutter under their breath, "Ireland 
for the Irish," a cry which, under the 
expanding influence of J. Kinahan, 
becomes freely translated into "to hell 
or to the sea with every bloody 
Protestant." 

There is not a Roman Catholic in 
Ulster to whom the promise of Home 
Rule does not mean the promise of the 
recovery of forfeited lands. In some 
districts the lands of the Protestant 
farmers have already been officially 
allotted among the native popula- 
tion. 

Out of a consideration of such a state 



122 The Soul of Ulster 

of society, two prima facie questions 
arise : 

(1) Are the aspirations of the native 
Irish for a restitution of their forfeited 
lands justified? 

(2) Would Home Rule give practical 
expression to such aspirations? 

The first question obviously opens up 
problems which reach far beyond the 
case of Ulster. It touches, more or less, 
the whole civilized world. Should Eng- 
land be evacuated in favour of the Welsh, 
the relics of the ancient Britons? Canada 
in favour of the Red Indians? New 
Zealand in favour of the Maoris? Should 
the French clear out of Algiers, the 
British out of Uganda, the Spanish out 
of the Argentine? We can extend the 
problem even further. Has any race on 
the globe a direct charter from God to 



Ulster To-day 123 

be where it now is? Where, for instance, 
are the Firbolgs of Ireland, according to 
the Four Masters overthrown and super- 
seded by the Milesians? 

All will agree that this first question 
can be summarily dismissed. It does not 
call for serious attention. Two wrongs 
have never yet made a right. Even 
assuming of the purpose of argument 
that the original act of plantation was 
an injustice, the dispossession of the 
colonists, after three hundred and ten 
years of exemplary occupation, would be 
an act of tenfold greater injustice. The 
colonists were neither pirates nor 
marauders. Their deportation was not 
even of their own doing. By a State 
measure they were — willy-nilly — taken 
from their own surroundings and dropped 
down in a strange land. In that strange 



124 The Soul of Ulster 

land they have an unbroken record of 
industry and loyalty. They can and do 
claim that every good thing, civil or 
military, that has ever come out of Ire- 
land, has come from the side of the 
colonists. On the reflected glory glancing 
off these achievements of the British 
colonists are built up all Ireland's claims 
to honourable mention in history. While 
in Irish home politics the Protestants are 
branded as foreigners, land-grabbers and 
interlopers, or, in local parlance, as the 
"English Garrison," on British platforms, 
or in the British Press, the deeds of the 
same "English Garrison" are proudly 
pointed to by Nationalist patriots as 
home products. It may truly be said 
that there is no race in the world which 
confers its nationality with a more 
generous hand on all successful and dis- 



Ulster To-day 125 

tinguished men. This, however, is for 
foreign consumption, and is a form of 
advertisement which is perhaps legiti- 
mate, and which is certainly successful. 
The point is that, as such successful and 
distinguished men — eagerly claimed for 
Ireland — are invariably of the race im- 
ported from England or Scotland, it may 
fairly be argued, even on the Nationalist 
showing, that the colonization of part of 
Ireland with men of another race has 
not proved an unmixed evil for the 
country. 

The second question at once raises more 
practical issues than the first. Would 
Home Rule result in attempts to dispossess 
the Protestant settlers of their footing 
in Ireland, and, if so, how? The first 
part of the question can be shortly dis- 
posed of. The attempt would be made; 



126 The Soul of Ulster 

it has been made on every occasion in the 
history of Ireland on which the native 
element has been in the ascendancy, and 
it would be made again. The intention, 
moreover, is tacitly admitted in the 
native shibboleth of "Ireland for the 
Irish;" it is more than tacitly admitted 
in moments of alcoholic or electioneering 
excitement. 

The attempt would not be made by 
methods of open violence. Of such de- 
velopments the Protestants have no fear. 
They are of a combative race; the natives 
are essentially non-combative in the 
British sense, that is to say, face-to-face 
fighting does not appeal to them. 

However, there is no question of face- 
to-face fighting. Every Protestant knows 
that this is so, and registers the knowledge 
without exultation. The attempt to rid 



Ulster To-day 127 

Ireland of the foreign element would be 
made by more characteristic methods, 
of which the more conspicuous would be 
as follows: 

(1) Petty injustices and persecu- 
tions which may be further sub- 
divided as follows: 

(a) Faking the Parliamentary re- 
presentation ; 

(b) Establishing native officials in 
every executive and remunera- 
tive post in the country. 

(2) Agrarian outrages. 

(3) Tammany methods. 

As the success and impunity of (2) 
would depend on (1) we will take the 
latter first. 

Parliamentary Representation 
In Ulster, Parliamentary elections are 



128 The Soul of Ulster 

not won, as in England, by persuasive 
oratory, by house to house canvassing, or 
by the proclamation through artistic 
posters of the candidates' views on social 
questions. Here no pictorial posters 
decorate derelict walls and gateways, no 
announcements of public meetings meet 
the eye of the wanderer through streets 
or country roads, no fervid exhortations 
to the public to vote for this or that candi- 
date; no ribbons, no party colours. 
During an election in which it is known 
that the majority one way or the other 
will be represented by single figures, and 
where the intensity of feeling is infinitely 
deeper than anything of which England 
has knowledge, there are no outward 
signs in the streets or market-places that 
anything outside of the ordinary daily 
routine is in progress. 



Ulster To-day 129 

To the eye experienced in local signs, 
there is something significant in the slightly 
furtive movements of the good citizens as 
they pass up and down the streets. They 
wear an air of mild conspiracy; at street 
corners they whisper eager inquiries as 
to the health of certain electors whose 
appearance at the poll is doubtful, accom- 
panied by pious expressions of hope for a 
change for the better (or for the worse, as 
the case may be) in the health of the 
patient concerned. Priests and members 
of the Royal Irish Constabulary are more 
in evidence than is usual, but otherwise 
there is no external sign that an election 
of consuming interest is in full swing. 
Meetings are held, but they are attended 
more as a sign of respect to the candidate 
than for educational purposes. The candi- 
date, for his part, dispenses ancient but 



130 The Soul of Ulster 

congenial party maxims rather than argu- 
ment. Argument indeed would be thrown 
away, seeing that no Nationalist ever 
attends a Unionist meeting, or vice versa. 
Why should they? 

Operations, in fact, between the day of 
nomination and the poll have little effect 
on the result of the election, except in so 
far as the organization of the party 
machinery for getting voters to the poll 
is concerned. The real election is won or 
lost at a tedious and wordy function 
known as the Revision Sessions. In 
English politics this operation has an 
entirely secondary importance, as political 
views are apt to change according to the 
humour of the moment, or the mis- 
demeanour of this or that government, so 
that party zeal at the Revision Sessions 
may, in the event, prove to have been in 



Ulster To-day 131 

the interests of the other side. In Ulster 
no such danger exists. There is only one 
issue — Home Rule or no Home Rule — and 
as to this, one race votes one way and the 
other race votes the other way, and so 
will to the end of time. 

The Revising Barrister, specially selected 
for the occasion, sits daily in the Court 
House over a period sometimes extending 
into weeks, during which he decides as 
to who is to be entitled to vote during the 
next twelve months. In the hands of 
this functionary lies the fate of the con- 
stituency. From seven to eight thousand 
names are paraded seriatim before him. 
The right of each name to be on the register 
is contested with much volubility and a 
good deal of earnest but conflicting per- 
jury. Dead men are sworn to be alive, 
live men are sworn to be dead. The 



132 The Soul of Ulster 

national lack of originality in nomencla- 
ture adds to the difficulties of judicial 
decision. One townland has been known 
to produce as many as forty men with 
the same Christian and surnames, these 
being domestically distinguished from one 
another by such descriptive terms as 
"Red," "Black," "The Pig," "Fire the 
Thatch," etc. It will easily be understood 
then, that, in a country where the imagina- 
tive faculty flourishes, the perplexities 
of the honest Revising Barrister are con- 
siderable, and he may have to sit daily for 
a month before the new register is officially 
stamped. However, he is well paid and 
content. 

The moment it is so stamped, the result 
of any election which may take place 
within the next twelve months becomes an 
ascertained quantity. Even the majority 



Ulster To-day 133 

of the Unionist or the Nationalist candi- 
date can be calculated with a truly sur- 
prising accuracy. A complete stranger 
to the district with a leaning towards 
ethnology could do it. The Celtic names 
are the Roman Catholics, the British names 
are the Protestants. The former will vote 
to a man ( dead or alive ) for the Nationalist 
candidate, the latter will vote for the 
Unionist candidate, but not to a man. 
Some will abstain owing to personal 
grievances, and some — such as the Coven- 
anters — will abstain owing to religious 
scruples, the exact nature of which no one 
who is not a Covenanter has ever been able 
accurately to gauge. But the conclusion 
of the whole matter is that the Revising 
Barrister, with a few strokes of his pen, 
can knock off a couple of hundred voters 
from one side and put on a couple of 



134 The Soul of Ulster 

hundred (new voters) to the other. 
There would be few seats in Ulster repre- 
sented by Protestants under Home Rule. 
(2) A Home Rule Parliament sitting 
in Dublin would probably be remarkable 
(among other things) for the appointment 
of more highly-paid and incompetent 
officials than any other institution of the 
same size in the world. But these good 
things which Ireland (at the cost of great 
sacrifice to the country generally) will 
provide for the upper stratum of patriots, 
will not come the way of the Protestants. 
The Law, the Police, the Post Office, 
Land Valuation, Inland Revenue and 
Excise will all be in the hands of the native 
Irish party, and they will push their 
advantage to the utmost limits. Senti- 
mental regard for a fallen foe is not one 
of their weaknesses. 



iti.i 



Ulster To-day 135 

This brings us to the point of (1) seeing 
the Protestants defrauded of their proper 
parliamentary representation by a mani- 
pulation of the register, and, in other 
cases, no doubt, by a manipulation of 
the geographical boundaries of the con- 
stituency, and (2) seeing them excluded 
from all official appointments under the 
Government in favour of native com- 
petitors. These two steps will be a 
necessary preliminary to carrying out (3) 
with impunity. 

No. 3, or, in other words, the third 
method which will be made use of to make 
Ulster unendurable to the Protestant 
settlers will be the time-honoured method 
of midnight prowlings and agrarian out- 
rages. The prevalence of such outrages 
in Ireland has always been in inverse 
ratio to the power of the law to deal with 



136 The Soul of Ulster 

them. They have, from the very back of 
history, been the favourite national 
weapon for inflicting injury on obnoxious 
persons, whom it might be dangerous to 
attack openly. With the entire machinery 
of the law and the police (as then consti- 
tuted) in sympathy with the ^'National" 
movement, it needs no profound student 
of Irish character to predict that outrages 
would advance in popularity with a leap. 
The hoisting of the green flag would be the 
signal for a vigorous revival of the stock 
programme of ham-stringing of horses, 
houghing of cattle, burning of rickyards, 
and — last but not least — clandestine 
attacks by armed groups upon solitary 
men returning home at night. Such have 
been the native methods from time 
immemorial. We have, in rhythmical 
succession in the annals of Ireland, the 



Ulster To-day 137 

Rapparees, the Houghers, the White-boys, 
the Defenders, the Molly Maguires, the 
Ribbonmen, the Moonlighters, and the 
Land-Leaguers, stretching over two and a 
half centuries, but all identical as to their 
methods; and that such methods will 
— whenever opportunity offers — continue 
to be identified with the Nationalist 
clamour for independence, or, in other 
words, freedom from the "English Garri- 
son," no sane man can doubt. They 
are the fighting methods of the race, to 
which the fear of conviction and punish- 
ment have always been the only deterrent; 
and under Home Rule neither convictions 
nor punishment would follow. Magis- 
trates, constables, judge and jury would 
be on the side of the perpetrators. The 
context is familiar. Blind policemen, deaf 
neighbours, witnesses with no memory, 



138 The Soul of Ulster 

are they not written in the book of the 
Chronicles of the Land of Erin? 

In such cases, where law and justice 
fail him, the Ulster Protestant will in- 
fallibly take his own measures for his 
protection. He is built that way. His 
resolution and his courage are unshakable. 
He has all the unflinching determination 
of his Border ancestors and by a question 
of principle he will stand to his last gasp. 

There is, at the moment of writing, no 
such mutual protection organization in 
Ulster, except the Orange Society. This 
society — contrary to the common belief 
in England — is at present a comparatively 
small organization, embracing quite an 
insignificant proportion of the total Pro- 
testant population; nor is it probable that 
it could ever form even the nucleus of a 
more comprehensive movement, many of 



Ulster To-day 139 

the most determined anti-Home-Rulers 
being out of sympathy with its way of 
expressing itself. Recent activities, how- 
ever, though they produced no universal 
protective league, have given evidence of 
very considerable organizing power, and 
of a unanimity of purpose which leaves 
little doubt but that an absolutely united 
front will be turned to the common danger 
when it arises. 



MOONLIGHT OUTRAGES 



T I^HE psychology of moonlight out- 
'■' rages, and of their invariable asso- 
ciation, through the centuries, with all 
Irish political movements, is worth a 
moment's consideration by the student 
of the Ulster question, because it (the 
psychology, that is) is a factor in the 
situation of the very first importance. 

The amiable tourist, or the occasional 
visitor to Ireland, with about as true a 
grasp of the Irish question as he (or she) 
has of the Zenda-Vesta, finds a constant 
difficulty in associating the good-humoured 
Paddies or Micks, who minister to their 
wants, with the inhuman cruelty to man 
and beast which so often characterizes 

143 



144 The Soul of Ulster 

agrarian outrages in Ireland. The peasant 
appears such a pleasant, light-hearted 
fellow, so appreciative of the visitor's 
personal appearance, so sceptical as to 
his, or her, revealed age, and so fiercely- 
denunciatory of the dirty villains who 
recently perpetrated the outrage at this 
or that farm, that it seems difficult to 
associate him and his kind with such 
cold-blooded brutality. But that he is 
associated with it, and closely too, is 
undeniable. The explanation lies in the 
domination of the "bad man." 

Every district in Ireland has its *'bad 
man," and sometimes its "bad men." 
This is not peculiar to Ireland, but the 
terrorizing influence of the bad man over 
an entire district is peculiar to Ireland. 
If the bad man has the support of the 
parish priest, the state of that district 



Moonlight Outrages 145 

will be bad indeed. If — as is very often 
the case — he is opposed by the parish 
priest, but supported by his curate, the 
latter combination will win the day, for 
they will threaten while the parish priest 
can only persuade, and intimidation is a 
weapon to which the Irish peasant will 
always yield. He does not by any means 
love the role of cut-throat into which he 
is pressed. He is at bottom — as the 
tourist rightly judges — a pleasant fellow 
enough. He has many gentlemanly char- 
acteristics to which his counterpart in 
England is a stranger; his instinct is to 
be courteous and even sycophantic to his 
social superiors. In the absence of whisky 
he is essentially non-aggressive, with a 
keen nose for danger and no quixotic 
prejudices. He has a protean genius for 
adapting his own views — for the moment 



146 The Soul of Ulster 

— ^to tbose of his interriewer. and, though 
weak, he is by no means inherently 
wicked: nor is his apparent friendliness 
by any means all a pose. There is a good 
deal of pose in it. but at the back of the 
pose there is a genuine desire to live and 
let live all romid. 

TMiat is it. then, that transforms this 
pleasant fellow into a demon capable of 
Balkan atrocities f Ala^I it is tlie "bad 
man" backed up by bad wliisky. In 
other countries tlie bad man is a pariah, 
hunted out of society and shuimed by 
the decent. In Ireland he is cock of the 
walk. His rule is wholly one of terror. 
The peasants hate him. but they will not 
stand up to him: it is not in their nature: 
it is easier and safer to toady him and to 
go the way he points. 

And so it happens that any devil with 



Moonlight Outrages 147 

a glib tongue and a gallon of potheen can 
sway the proletariat as he wills. Potheen, 
it may be explained, is raw spirit distilled 
mainly from potatoes. It emanates from 
secret stills in the mountains, and pays no 
duty, but its effect on human nature is 
bad — maddening and brutalizing — and, 
taken in quantities, it quickly transforms 
kindly, peaceable men into fully-equipped 
fiends. Then the bad man preaches his 
crusade. This limb of Satan is gifted, like 
all his race, with the complete equipment 
of the mob-orator; he knows the material 
he has to deal with from A to Z. He 
knows that his following is weak, timid, 
and lamentably lacking in a thirst for 
blood. That is where the potheen comes 
in. It pays no duty, and he can afford 
to dispense it with a free hand. And so, 
in due course, he leads forth his maddened 



148 The Soul of Ulster 

band to their bloody work. He himself, 
as the head and brain of the enterprise, 
takes care to drink no more than will fill 
him with the military ardour necessary 
for the enterprise; but his following are 
primed up to any devilry. 

In the morning comes repentance, as 
it ever has done, and ever will as long 
as the sun sets and rises again. To some 
come also a sickening horror of deeds 
only dimly remembered, and a hatred of 
the leaders who have organized and 
engineered such devilries. 

Out of these mixed feelings is evolved 
the informer. The Irish are often stig- 
matized as a race of informers. This 
fallacy — for it is strictly speaking a fallacy 
— arises from a misconception of the real 
motives which so often lead to the giving 
of information from inside. The truth is 



Moonlight Outrages 149 

that it frequently happens that an asso- 
ciate in a conspiracy becomes an informer, 
not from motives of treachery, or greed, 
or even fear, but because he really loathes 
at heart the business into which he has 
been drawn. 

The curse of Ireland is, and always has 
been, lack of moral courage. The native 
Celt will do anything rather than incur 
the unpopularity of his fellows, and so, 
from inability to say no, he is dragged 
into a conspiracy which he loathes. His 
ineradicable desire to be on good terms 
with all parties leads him, for a time, to 
attempt the complicated manoeuvre of 
running with the hare and hunting with 
the hounds, till in the end he finds the 
double role an impossibility, forsakes the 
conspiracy and becomes an informer. But 
it is important to bear in mind that he 



150 The Soul of Ulster 

becomes an informer, not out of deliberate 
treachery, but rather from the promptings 
of an over-charged conscience. The first 
cause of trouble is the moral weakness 
which prevents him from standing up to 
the insinuating overtures of the bad 
man; the second cause of trouble is the 
potheerl. 

In all forecasts of the possibilities and 
probabilities which may follow on the 
administration of Home Rule; in all 
analyses of the national temperament, and 
of the prospects of brotherly harmony 
between the two conflicting elements 
living side by side in Ireland, potheen is 
a factor to be reckoned with. It is the 
one certain intervener in the debate. 

From the earliest days of stills in Ire- 
land, the administration of potheen has 
been an indispensable preliminary to all 



Moonlight Outrages 151 

native excursions under arms. Every 
horrid act in the long red list of Irish 
atrocities has been perpetrated under the 
spur of this fiery stimulant. And as long 
as potheen is distilled, or as long as cheap 
fusil-oil whisky can be bought, the march 
of events in Ireland will be largely shaped 
out of its fumes. 



THE RED HAND OF ULSTER 



ryiHE red hand of Ulster, as its motto 
-*■ makes clear, is a friendly and not 
a threatening hand. Its sinister colour, 
founded on legend, was painted many 
hundred years before Ulster was planted 
with British colonists, and must not be 
taken as indicative of its habits or designs. 
It was adopted by Ulstermen ready- 
painted, and — red as it is — it is the hand 
of good will, and never yet has it been 
raised by them against a neighbour, 
except in self-defence. In order to sub- 
stantiate this statement by statistics, the 
rest of Ireland's Protestants must be 
taken into partnership. Then the per- 
sistent good will of this much-hated colony 

155 



156 The Soul of Ulster 

towards those who so hate them may be 
partially understood. 

It will be generally admitted that when 
an expanding race encroaches upon the 
lands of weaker nationalities, and estab- 
lishes itself in their midst, there is a 
tendency on the part of the invaded races 
to disappear. 

In the vast territories of the United 
States, Canada, Australia and New Zea- 
land the native populations have almost 
reached vanishing point. We do not look 
too closely into the cause. In Ireland 
the reverse has been the case. In 1650 
the native Roman Catholic population 
was reckoned at 750,000. To-day it 
numbers three and a quarter millions. 
Although the Nationalists openly pro- 
claim that their ultimate aim is to regain 
''Ireland for the Irish;" although in 



The Ked Hand of Ulster 157 

moments of alcoholic expansion they make 
the same announcement in more expressive 
terms; although on two historic occasions 
they have attempted the wholesale exter- 
mination of the Protestant settlers, there 
has never been any corresponding attempt 
on the part of the settlers to exterminate 
the natives. The bloody raids of the 
soldiery in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries cannot be laid at the door of the 
settlers; they were essentially military 
raids, carried out by paid soldiers, of 
whom many were themselves native 
Roman Catholic Irish. A settler is a 
farmer, or a trader, and his ways are for 
peace. 

Again, agrarian outrages, the foremost 
of the stock weapons employed for regain- 
ing Ireland for the Irish, have always 
been exclusively associated with Nation- 



158 The Soul of Ulster 

alist or native tactics. The Protestants 
are not built that way. 

Let us turn to another dark chapter in 
Ireland's history, which the English 
Government and the "English Garrison" 
in Ireland — had they been so evilly dis- 
posed — might have used as a weapon put 
into their hands by Providence with 
which to rid Ireland of the native ele- 
ment. In the great famine which followed 
the potato rot of 1846, many thousands 
of the Irish died. If it had not been for 
the intervention of the British Govern- 
ment, and the British Protestant residents 
in Ireland, the mortality would have 
been incomparably greater. The Govern- 
ment voted £10,000,000. The further con- 
tributions of the resident settlers can 
never be assessed in actual figures, as no 
formal records were kept; but this much. 



The Red Hand of Ulster 159 

at least, is on record — ^that they gave 
with an unstinting hand, and of their 
best, in money, in kind and in charitable 
labour, for which they received the usual 
guerdon of curses. 

Mr. W. Stewart Trench, one of the 
most active workers throughout the 
famine, in his famous book, "Realities of 
Irish Life," says: "Presentment Sessions 
were held, relief committees organized, 
and the roads were tortured and cut up; 
hills were lowered and hollows filled, and 
wages were paid for half or quarter work 
— but still the people died. Soup kitchens 
and stirabout houses were resorted to. 
Free trade was partially adopted. Indian 
meal poured into Ireland; individual 
exertions and charity abounded to an 
enormous extent — but still the people died. 
Many of the highest and noblest in the 



160 The Soul of Ulster 

land, both men and women, lost their 
lives or contracted diseases from which 
they never afterwards recovered in their 
endeavours to stay this fearful calamity 
— but still the people died." 

The clearances which followed (favourite 
theme of the Nationalist tub-orator), 
viewed through any other medium than 
those of green spectacles, were a plain 
work of charity. The population was 
greater than the resources of the country. 
Nature had for the moment adjusted this 
discrepancy with her usual callous bru- 
tality, but the adjustment was only 
temporary. The prolificity of the native 
element was proverbial and was openly 
encouraged by the priests. A recurrence 
of the disaster sooner or later was in- 
evitable; all the circumstances of the 
case were clamouring for it. 



The Red Hand of Ulster 161 

An enfeebled, but recklessly fruitful, 
population, with no genius for agriculture, 
was, by the irony of fate, densely packed 
in a land where no employment offered 
but agriculture. A merciful considera- 
tion of these desperate conditions led to 
what are locally known as the "clear- 
ances." In the more congested districts, 
families were financially assisted to 
migrate to the newer world, where they 
and their descendants have since reaped 
prosperity, with wider elbow-room, and 
in more congenial urban pursuits. 

Lord Lansdowne alone made a free 
gift of £17,000 to assist emigration from 
his Kerry estate. In England a man who 
opens his purse-strings for such a purpose 
would be hailed as a philanthropist. In 
Ireland he is shot at from behind walls. 
Here again the bed-rock grievance is 



162 The Soul of Ulster 

clerical. The "clearance" crime lay in 
helping to remove from the country large 
blocks of the native Irish, who might 
more profitably have been engaged in 
paying dues to their respective soggarths. 
It might be admitted that they could not 
have stayed where they were under 
existing conditions, but they could have 
stayed had the lands in occupation of the 
foreign Protestants been at their disposal. 
Here we come down once more to the 
one and only root of the Irish question. 
There is method — and very systematic 
method — behind the apparent unreason- 
ableness of Irish political agitation. 

Nearly seventy years have passed since 
the Clearances, and for the benefit of 
the third generation — knowing nothing of 
the real circumstances — it is easy for the 
agitator to draw up a moving picture of 



The Red Hand of Ulster 163 

injustice. But however bitter his words 
may be (and he is nothing if not bitter) 
it is never so much as suggested that the 
primary object of the Clearances was the 
extermination of the native population. 
The venom of the speaker is rather 
directed against landlords and rent-paying 
in general; "pheasants have taken the 
place of peasants," and so on. The 
English Garrison qua Garrison is not 
attacked nor even directly associated with 
the Clearance grievance. All this has 
a value as evidence of the non-aggressive 
character of the militant Protestants in 
Ireland. In view of the very wrong im- 
pression which has gained ground among 
the half -informed in England, it is im- 
portant that this should be understood. 
The policy of the Protestants towards 
the natives is, and always has been, 



164 The Soul of Ulster 

honestly pacific. They have no wish to 
interfere with anyone's possessions, re- 
ligion or liberties. They only want to 
live and let live. Their parades, their 
drills, their "no surrender" resolutions 
are neither aggressive nor even pro- 
vocative in intention. They are simply 
precautionary measures against dangers, 
the reality of which Ulstermen know, 
and England will not be persuaded of. 

The Sinn Fein Movement 

This organization was originally started 
by a few ecstatic cranks whose aim was 
the revival of bombastic native poetry, 
and of ancient dresses which had never 
existed. Highland kilts and Highland 
pipes were frankly pirated, and ante-dated 
as native products. All this was perfectly 



The Red Hand of Ulster 165 

harmless as far as it went, but it goes 
without saying that a society started on 
such lines would not retain its original 
character for long. A fruitful recruiting 
ground was soon found among hooligans, 
corner-boys and loafers generally, to whom 
any form of pageantry and tom-foolery 
was preferable to work. Gradually came 
the inevitable playing at soldiers, which 
culminated in April, 1916, in the abortive 
attempt to seize Dublin by force of arms. 
As an act of militarism the attempt was 
the most dismal of failures. A number of 
inoffensive citizens and some wounded 
soldiers were shot by the "rebels," but as 
soon as bullets began to fly in the opposite 
direction, the rebellion collapsed. A few 
— a very few — of the ringleaders were tried 
by Martial Law and executed, and at 
once entered the ranks of Irish Martyrs. 



166 The Soul of Ulster 

This was quite in keeping with recognized 
procedure, and illustrates very in- 
structively the absolute immutability of 
native Irish aspirations, and the distorted 
perspective which is created by the sanctity 
of those aspirations. 

In this perspective all persons executed 
for taking part in rebellions are ipso facto 
martyrs. It matters not in the least what 
barbarities they may or may not have 
committed; it matters not to what extent 
they may have violated all recognized 
laws of God and man. These things 
count for nothing, because they were done 
in the sacred cause of ridding Ireland of 
the British resident element {Le,j the 
Protestants). Not only does the end in 
this case justify the means; it actually 
sanctifies them. 

Whether that end is a legitimate one 



The Red Hand of Ulster 167 

or not is a matter of opinion, but it must 
be remembered that to the native mind it 
is par excellence the one sacred cause for 
which they have struggled for seven hun- 
dred years, and therefore any acts what- 
soever committed in furtherance of that 
sacred cause become themselves sacred. 
Thus, when we hear Napper Tandy 
pathetically complaining after the 1798 
rebellion that "they're hanging men and 
women for the wearing of the green," it 
cannot but occur to the ordinarily- 
balanced mind that the hangings in 
question were not for the wearing of the 
green, but for a succession of particularly 
brutal and cold-blooded murders. But 
to the native mind they were not murders 
at all, but justifiable and even glorious 
acts of war, because in furtherance of 
the sacred cause. 



168 The Soul of Ulster 

It must be remembered, before wholly 
condemning such a point of view as 
extravagant, that the native mind has for 
centuries been trained to the idea that 
the art of war lies in the attack of the 
defenceless and the avoidance of the 
strong. This fixed idea is reflected 
throughout the history of the country. 
We search in vain for Bannockburns and 
Floddens. They are not there. In their 
place we find Lisgools and Scullabogues. 

It is not surprising then, that, where 
such a baffling confusion of ideas, as 
between murder and fighting, is traditional, 
there should be a general outcry among 
the natives when the murder penalty is 
exacted for that which, in their perspec- 
tive, amounts to no more than an ordinary 
act of war. They see no ethical difference 
between the killing of a hundred enemy 



The Red Hand of Ulster 169 

soldiers in battle and the killing of a hun- 
dred enemy neighbours in cold blood, 
except that the latter is the safer and 
therefore the preferable course. It there- 
fore arouses, not simulated, but honest 
and genuine surprise and indignation 
when those convicted of unprovoked 
murders are not treated as honourable 
prisoners of war. 

Though defeated in the field, the Sinn 
Fein organization gained strength instead 
of losing it. Its exact aim in its new 
military character was obscure, but this 
did not affect its popularity. Sinn Fein 
means "ourselves alone," and it may 
safely be said that an aim so commendable 
would receive the active support of every- 
one east of the Irish Sea were it not for 
the existence of thirteen hundred thousand 
solid objections. At present the fact that 



170 The Soul of Ulster 

these thirteen hundred thousand are in 
existence puts any such proposal out of 
court, for reasons which the foregoing pages 
have tried to make clear. It is quite 
possible, however, that the Sinn Fein, in its 
ultimate development, may alter all this, 
and may, in fact, in another generation 
or two even bring about the long-sought 
solution of the Irish problem. 

The colossal possibilities of the move- 
ment towards an ultimate settlement lie 
in its anti-clerical character. In this 
respect it constitutes a wholly new de- 
parture in the history of Ireland. The 
rebellion of 1798, it is true, started on non- 
sectarian lines, but all parties concerned 
retained their distinctive religions, merely 
joining hands temporarily to defeat or 
paralyse the executive forces of the 
moment. We know now how during the 



The Red Hand of Ulster 171 

short period when this object was effected, 
the native population of Wexford and 
Wicklow merely took advantage of the 
paralysis of the law to attempt the ex- 
termination of their Protestant neighbours. 
The clerical element was throughout the 
preponderating influence. 

The Sinn Fein, on the other hand, 
acknowledges no standardized religion. 
Its numbers include both native Celts and 
British settlers, the former being, of course, 
in a very large majority; and it is not only 
a non-sectarian body but a non-religious 
one. Herein lie its limitless potentialities. 
It is true the old racial boundaries are still 
clearly defined by the names, but in 
another generation — if the Sinn Fein move- 
ment continues to spread — these boun- 
daries will be far vaguer, for Celt and 
Anglo-Saxon will, for the first time for 



172 The Soul of Ulster 

three hundred years, intermarry and so 
mix the races. The bar to intermarriage 
so far has always been that the offspring 
must be brought up Roman Catholic. 
To the trained Protestant mind this is a 
contingency so detestable as to be outside 
of contemplation. The Sinn Feiner, how- 
ever, has no such prejudices. His or her 
children will be brought up free of alle- 
giance to any fixed creed. The religious 
boundaries will disappear, names will no 
longer be an infallible indication of race, 
and the bridgeless chasm between the 
native and the colonist will be a thing of 
the past. 

The building up in this way of a new 
breed, cleansed of traditional prejudices, 
and educated on broad and liberal lines, 
cannot fail to revolutionize political aspira- 
tions in Ireland. The probability is that 



The Red Hand of Ulster 173 

the clamour for Home Rule, being (outside 
of predatory politicians) based on a foun- 
dation of ignorance, will die a natural 
death, and that its place will be taken by 
a vigorous internal socialism. The swing 
of the pendulum, after centuries of clerical 
bondage, will probably be to its limit, and 
iconoclasm of all sorts will run riot. For 
this reason the movement is feared by 
both priests and politicians. These see 
their long-coveted control of the exchequer 
seriously threatened, and would gladly 
see the movement and all its supporters 
at the bottom of the Atlantic, but for 
prudential reasons think it wisest to 
simulate sympathy. 

How far this enforced pose will serve 
then remains to be seen, but it is a matter 
of little general interest. The interest 
lies in the possible transfiguration of the 



174 The Soul of Ulster 

Irish question by the spread of Sinn- 
Feinism. A cry will arise which will be 
a genuine national cry, not the screech of 
threadbare party saws. On the great 
crucial question of Home Rule or no Home 
Rule, Ireland will become of one mind. 
The strong probability is that the verdict 
will be against Home Rule. When the 
priests can no longer cherish their dream 
of seeing the surface of Ireland peopled 
with Irish Roman Catholics, who pay dues, 
in place of British Protestants, who do 
not, all the driving force will be out of the 
Home Rule crusade. As in the case of 
many other movements decorated with a 
picturesque veneer, the bed-rock motive 
is purely sordid. 

In the almost inconceivable contingency 
of the verdict, under such conditions, 
being in favour of Home Rule, the British 



The Red Hand of Ulster 175 

Government will be able, without com- 
punction, to cut adrift an island which is 
valueless as an asset, and the considera- 
tion of whose affairs ceaselessly clogs the 
wheels of Parliament. This is always 
supposing that by the disappearance of 
religious obstacles — consequent on an anti- 
clerical campaign — the race distinctions 
which have always divided Ireland become 
so blurred that native is indistinguish- 
able from colonist, and that therefore no 
persecution of the latter will be possible. 
If Sinn Feinism prospers, such a state of 
things is within reach of imagination. A 
generation hence and Hugh O'Kane may 
have had an Anglo-Saxon mother, and 
David Baird a Celtic one — both impossible 
contingencies at the present day. 

While, from the pacificist point of view, 
there is much to be said in favour of such 



176 The Soul of Ulster 

a removal of the religious distinctions 
which at present advertise the racial origin 
of every Ulsterman, it is doubtful whether 
the Province as a whole would be a gainer. 
The experience of the other three Pro- 
vinces in the past goes to show that the 
effect of mixing the two races is not always 
elevating, but rather the reverse. In any 
case, it is safe to predict that in Ulster 
any such revolutionary ideas will take hold 
very slowly. The religious habit, whether 
it be Protestant or whether it be Catholic, 
is too firmly rooted. A mixed breed may, 
and probably will, arise; but its spread 
will be slow, and the true Ulsterman will 
relinquish his birthright reluctantly, and 
only by the pressure of very gradual 
processes. 



CONCLUSION 



WHEN a de novo inquirer has 
gained a glimpse into the secret 
soul of Ulster, so carefully screened from 
public gaze by both parties (though for 
widely different reasons), he is only nearer 
a solution of the general problem by this 
much — that he can clear his mind of 
current fallacies. Unfortunately, how- 
ever, this clearance — highly necessary as 
it may be as a preliminary step to con- 
structive experiment — only leaves the 
difficulties greater than they were before. 
This is quickly realized, and with the 
realization comes the gradual conviction 
that legislative overtures are powerless 
to deal with the situation, and that no 

179 



180 The Soul of Ulster 

lasting removal of existing conflicts, or 
of bitter party friction is possible, except 
by a mergement of the two antagonistic 
races into one homogeneous mass. The 
root matter of the antagonism is too 
real. If it were sentimental, traditional 
or merely religious, as many people in 
England still suppose, a gradual incline 
towards tolerance from both sides might 
be hoped for. But as long as our race, 
clearly ear-marked by its religion, occupies 
lands belonging by tradition to another 
race, also clearly ear-marked by its 
religion, harmony is no more possible 
than it is between the dog with the bone 
and the dog without it. 

The situation is sublimely simple in its 
general outline. On the one side we have 
the Roman Catholic natives, an emotional 
and a credulous people, dispossessed of 



Conclusion 181 

lands which have since become responsive 
and profitable — a people happily ignorant 
of the horrid circumstances which justi- 
fied the dispossession, and wholly lacking 
in the judicial sense to weigh those cir- 
cumstances, even if known. As a con- 
sequence, they waste the centuries in 
nursing an eternal grievance which, 
though real in substance, is easily weighed 
down by the other side of the Balance 
Sheet, but which from its very nature is 
capable of being magnified to any extent 
by a skilful distortion of facts. This 
they get in plenty. 

On the other side we have the Pro- 
testants — British Colonists occupying half 
the lands of Ulster, but, in their occupa- 
tion, conscious of having done no man 
wrong. The vexed question of right and 
wrong lies between the native proprietors 



182 The Soul of Ulster 

and the English Government. It is no 
concern of the Ulster Protestants. Their 
lands at least have been honestly come 
by, either by direct dealings with the 
English Government, or with those hold- 
ing under the English Government. If 
the title of the Government was faulty, 
then the immorality of transfer lies at the 
door of the Government, not of the 
unhappy transferees. A man is not re- 
sponsible for the back history of every 
Chippendale chair he buys. 

But in the eyes of the natives the 
Ulster Protestants are the practical ex- 
pression of a systematic policy of dis- 
possession, and as such they are the very 
abomination of desolation standing in 
the holy place. Even if not principals, 
they are looked upon as agents, and it 
must not be forgotten that in Ireland 



Conclusion 183 

agents are shot, not because they are 
themselves cruel or bad men, but because 
they are representative of a system. 

And so, in the native privy councils, 
the Protestants are doomed to be returned 
to their own shores, or, at any rate, 
eliminated from Irish soil whenever the 
opportunity may offer. Of this impend- 
ing doom the Protestants are profoundly 
aware, but they do not anticipate its 
easy fulfilment. They are a strong race, 
brave and true, and with a clean con- 
science, and to the position which they 
have built up for themselves in the 
country they will cling with the last gasp 
of their bodies. 

In the conflict between these two points 
of view, it would be easy for a lawyer to 
argue hotly and convincingly on either 
side. The main Irish case, however, 



184 The Soul of Ulster 

strong as it can be made on public plat- 
forms by a careful selection of cir- 
cumstances, seems hopelessly prejudiced, 
from the strictly judicial standpoint, by 
the one initial fact that the English 
originally came over to Ireland, not as 
invaders, but on the express invitation 
of Dermot McMurrough, King of Leinster, 
in order to expel the Danes, who were 
then over-running the land. Henry II., 
who in the following year (1171) landed 
at Waterford, was solemnly received as 
a deliverer and named supreme King of 
Ireland. 

Roger Hoveden, the historian of the 
day, says: 

"All the Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots 
of all Ireland came to the King of England 
at Waterford, and received him for King 
and Lord of Ireland; swearing fealty 



Conclusion 185 

to him and his heirs, and the power of 
reigning over them for ever; and then 
they gave him their instruments — and 
after the example set them by the clergy, 
the aforesaid Kings and Princes of 
Ireland (namely, the Kings of Cork, 
Limerick, Ossory, Meath, and Reginald 
of Waterford), who had been summoned 
by King Henry's command to appear in 
his presence, and almost all the nobles of 
Ireland (except the King of Connaught) 
did in like manner receive Henry, King 
of England, for Lord and King of Ire- 
land, and they became his men, and 
swore fealty to him and his heirs against 
all men." Roderick O'Connor, King of 
Connaught, followed suit in 1175, he being 
the last of the native Princes to come in. 

Here, then, we have the whole of Ireland, 
through its Church and State representa- 



186 The Soul of Ulster 

tives, acknowledging the King of England 
as their King for ever, on account of 
military services rendered, by which Ire- 
land had been saved from the invader. 
In the light of this one starting-point, 
subsequent rebellions in Ireland do not 
stand out as noble struggles for liberty 
on the part of a conquered people, but 
as treacherous repudiations of a solemn 
covenant which had been entered into 
at the instigation of the Irish themselves. 
It follows logically that all confiscations 
of land consequent upon such rebellions 
were not acts of oppression, but perfectly 
just and proper penalties imposed for 
disloyal conduct. If this standpoint can 
be maintained, the entire "confiscation" 
grievance falls to the ground. 

In this connection it is useful to bear 
in mind that the material aims of the 



Conclusion 187 

native proletariat, and of the priests who 
educate them, are in widely different 
directions. The priests, quite naturally, 
aim at seeing Ireland entirely peopled 
by Catholics who would be a source of 
profit to them; the proletariat aims at 
the re-occupation of forfeited lands now 
in the hands of the Protestants. But 
the latter aim, which is necessarily ill- 
defined in detail, and at the best is a 
somewhat far-off cry, is only kept alive 
by constant hard work on the part of 
the priests, backed up sporadically but 
not very effectively by politicians. The 
anti-Protestant land agitation is merely 
the lever by which these two associates 
in patriotism hope to arrive at their own 
ends, which are perfectly well-defined, 
though likely in the case of success to be 
somewhat conflicting. 



188 The Soul of Ulster 

The present barrier to the mergement 
of the two races, which alone can solve 
the Ulster question, is the Roman Catholic 
Church, which interposes impassable 
barriers of moral barbed-wire between 
the native population and the Protestant 
colonists. 

It is possible that — for reasons already 
given — the Sinn Fein movement may 
ultimately remove that barrier. When 
that takes place, hatred of England, with 
all its convenient accessories in the way 
of conscientious objection to service in 
time of war, will die a natural death. It 
is a manufactured article, and the driving- 
power of the factory will give out. 

THE END 



